Bad Pennies
by Neale
Summary: This is a follow on from Where Do We Go To, some have asked for an account of what happened to the "villains" in my story line, so that's what this one will be (mostly anyway). Of course, you know what they say, be careful what you wish for ; ) This one is "darker" than Where Do We Go To, you have be warned!
1. Mommy Dearest 1

**This is a follow on from Where Do We Go To, some have said that they would like to see what would happen with the Douchebags of the past, so we'll see what we can do.**

**In case the idiom isn't as well known as I thought, "turning up like a bad penny" is a reference to "people" that you can't get rid of, no matter how much you want to, sort of like a case of herpes.**

**Usual disclaimer for the Land of Litigation, no rights to any characters referred to...**

Chuck called upstairs for the fourth time for Yvonne to get moving, she had to have breakfast before they took her and Zack to school. His eldest daughter drove him around the bend much of the time, she was beautiful, wilful, stubborn and had miles of attitude, a perfect little copy of her mother, which was probably why he loved her so much. Sarah was trying to hide her laughter behind her coffee mug at the other end of the table, she knew that Chuck adored all their children, but Yvonne was his obvious favourite because she was a mini me of her mother (not that she remembered having this much attitude when she was her age), so she pushed his buttons all the time. Before things could get to melt down stage she schooled her expression and got up, went to the bottom of the stairs and called to tell her that she had 30 seconds to be sitting at the table eating breakfast, or else. Less than 10 seconds later she heard her running for the stairs, she muttered "Sorry Mommy" as she passed her and hugged Chuck as she told him "Love you Daddy" and sat down for breakfast. As Sarah came back to the table, Chuck gave her a look of reproach, so she smiled and kissed him on the cheek, whispering "Don't blame me for you being a pushover for your daughter" in his ear, which made him grin and wrap his arm around her to give her a quick hug. Once Yvonne and Zack had had breakfast, they grabbed their school bags, there was a whirlwind of kisses around the table and they piled into the back seat of their mother's Shooting Brake to go to school.

When she dropped them off at school, there were the usual round of stares of lust and jealousy at the "supermodel" mother dropping off her beautiful children in her rare and unobtainable (without serious connections anyway) supercar, but she felt something else, as though there was someone else watching her who was different from the normal crowd. After she'd hugged and kissed her eldest twins and watched them walk into the school grounds, she quickly scanned the area again but couldn't see anyone out of the ordinary and put it down to being overly cautious as she hopped back into the Shooting Brake and left, not noticing the car that pulled out to follow her 20 seconds after she'd passed it.

Sarah went into the office to put in a couple of hours of work after dropping the twins off at school and then headed home. This time she did notice the car as she passed it, as she recognised it from when she'd scanned the area around the school when she dropped the twins off. She sent a text to Carina with the license plate to get her to check it out, knowing that support would be coming after them straight away, in the meantime she reached down to get the pistol from its holster under the driver's seat as she drove. As expected, she saw Carina's Lotus turn up in her mirrors less than 10 minutes after she'd sent the text, and Casey's Crown Vic showed up behind the Lotus just after that.

Zondra called her as soon as they had her in sight, telling her that she, Carina, and Casey were back there, and filling her in on the details they found on the car. It had been bought two weeks ago by a woman, but it was doubtful that an 80 year old woman would be driving a tricked out Charger like that (going by the details of the car in the ad that they called up), so they had to expect that another woman had stolen her identity and faked licences, credit cards and whatever else they needed with their own photos etc.

Unfortunately that didn't reduce the possible pool of who'd be after her that much, as she'd taken down a lot of women, as well as men, when she was in the game. When Zondra started to ask whether they should tell Chuck she cut her off with a curt "No!", she wanted to find out what they were up against before they worried him. She headed towards home by a roundabout route, stopping to pick up a few things on the way. At this point she was wishing that she was wearing a vest, and that she was driving Chuck's Odyssey, perhaps it was time to think about giving up this gorgeous car he got for her and replace it with something sensible and safe like he'd done when Jaqui and Piotr were born. She did truly love this car, but just as he'd accepted that they needed to be safe for the kids, she should as well, maybe his and her Odysseys wouldn't be too bad? He'd designed that machine perfectly, it had the performance and handling to pretty much match her Shooting Brake, with the styling changes he'd had made it looked pretty good, it could take everyone with room to spare, and it could take on LAVs and get the occupants, their family, away safe, she could live with that.

Sarah shook her head and told herself to concentrate, checking to make sure she could still see all three cars in her mirrors, about that time Zondra called again and told her to drive to her in-laws' house, Mary was ready and waiting, and they'd box the other car in and take them once she was out of the line of fire, Sarah confirmed and got her head in the game, it looked like it would be show time soon. It all went as planned, the garage door opened as she drove up and closed as soon as she was inside, Mary had a set of tactical gear, armour and weapons waiting for her and she quickly changed in the garage before they ducked down through the bunker to come up in Casey's house, hopping out the window to sneak out behind the shrubs to the street and call Carina and Casey to move in on the parked car. In seconds the car was boxed in and the driver was in the sights of the five figures surrounding the car in full tactical gear, Sarah was the first (only) one to lower her weapon as she looked at the woman and asked "What are you doing here Jill?".

They quickly pulled her out of the car, zip tied her hands and pushed her into the back seat before they all hopped into the cars and got them off the street, hoping that the neighbours hadn't seen anything, or not much anyway. As they dragged Jill down to the bunker, Casey reminded Sarah that they'd have to tell Chuck what was going on soon, and she snapped at him that she knew that, then apologised and said that she just wanted to find out what the hell that woman was doing here before they brought Chuck into it, her eyes imploring him to give her that much. Casey nodded, but reminded her that Chuck never chose Jill over her, as soon as it came to a choice he immediately went for her safety over anything for Jill, so she didn't need to bring the old jealousy issues into any discussions they had, looking her in the eye until she nodded and said that she knew that. It wasn't much but that took her away from the edge, so she was less likely to do something drastic to the bitch, not that Casey would leave her alone with her anyway, she could trust him to stop her from doing anything too stupid.

Sarah gave Jill a while to stew as she tried to calm herself down before she went in, that of course all went to shit with Jill's first response. Sarah opened with the same question she'd asked at the car "What are you doing here Jill?", Jill just looked at her and smugly said that she thought Chuck would want to see his son, his first born son that is. Sarah stared at her for about 30 seconds before she launched herself at Jill, Casey literally had to snatch her out of mid air to stop her getting to Jill, carrying her kicking and screaming out of the interrogation room and off to a holding cell. Carina was waiting with her finger on the door controls so as soon as Casey tossed Sarah across the cell onto the cot, she hit the door mechanism to prevent Sarah getting out. They were both glad the holding cell was soundproof as what she was obviously screaming at them when she got to the door and started banging on it wasn't what anything they wanted to hear. They didn't know what affected them more, Sarah's current state, or the statement that had got her to that state. Casey put his palm on the glass door, looked Sarah in the eye and told her that he'd get the truth out of Jill, she stared at him for a minute or so and crumpled, nodding with tears in her eyes. They wanted to let her out, but until they had the real story it wasn't safe to do so, she could recognise that. Carina put her palm to the door as well, and told her that they'd get the answers before she turned and went back into the interrogation room with Casey.

Carina opened the questioning this time, standing in front of the table and asking Jill why she thought that they'd believe anything from a lying slut like her. Jill just smirked and said that they cold get all the DNA tests they wanted, the tests would just prove that Charles was Chuck's son. Casey pushed in and said that she'd been examined and tested thoroughly when she went to prison, and she definitely wasn't pregnant then, so how did she have Chuck's child? She sure as hell didn't sleep with him when they got her out to help look into Fulcrum to find Chuck's father. Jill's smug look faltered a little at this point, and she told them that she'd taken the condom after they made love and stored it. Carina jumped back in there, asking how she happened to have a mechanism for storing sperm to keep it viable with her at the time. Jill looked down and said that they were fairly certain that Chuck was the Intersect, so she'd been ordered to get his sperm for the purpose of creating viable Intersect hosts, and was given the equipment that she'd need to do so.

Carina looked sick at that (and considering what she'd been through in her career it took a LOT to shock her), but then Casey asked how she came to be impregnated with Chuck's sperm after he let her go the second time? Jill hadn't looked up in about 5 minutes and she kept her head down as she told them that she'd stashed the storage container in a safe place before she was imprisoned, and she retrieved it when she went on the run. She was running from everyone, including the government and Fulcrum, so she thought if she was carrying the only viable progeny of the Intersect, Fulcrum would have to take her back. They both looked at her in disgust and Carina responded "So you screwed Chuck to steal his sperm, and then after he risked being charged with treason to let you go with a ring that you could sell for the money to get away, you impregnated yourself with his sperm to buy your way back into the very organisation that you were running away from? You take the meaning of pathetic whore to a whole new low!". Casey was old school and a gentleman at heart (though he'd fight anyone who called him that), so he normally found Carina's language and crudity rather offensive, but at this time he couldn't do anything but wholeheartedly agree with her.

They both left the interrogation room and shut the door as they couldn't stand being anywhere near her. They went back to the conference room and sat down at the table, not talking, just trying to get their heads around what they'd been told. After a while they looked at each other and Casey said that they still had to find out what she was after. Carina looked like the idea turned her stomach but she nodded and stood up with a resigned expression, waiting for Casey before they headed back. Neither if them wanted to be alone with the room with her as they needed each other to prevent them killing her, this foul creature could destroy Chuck and Sarah, and ultimately the Clan Carmichael, as the Clan couldn't survive without Chuck and Sarah.

When they went back in, Jill had recovered her bravado as she thought that having Chuck's son was a big enough bargaining chip to hold over them to get what she wanted. Casey just asked her what she wanted, and she replied that by the time she could get back to Fulcrum, you people had taken them down, so she'd been on the run with Charles for the last eight years and she didn't have any money. Chuck obviously had plenty of money from the way his whore and her little bastards were flaunting it, so she'd come to get her share of the money. Carina and Casey just stared at her for about 30 seconds and then Casey lashed out with an open handed slap that sent her flying, well as far as she could before the tether that locked her zip tied hands to the table pulled her up. Carina looked at Casey in reproach and pointed out to him that she was supposed to be the psycho bitch here, as she helped Jill up off the floor, and then smashed her face into the table. Grinding her face into the table she kept asking Jill where the boy was until she told them. With that piece of information they made sure she was breathing OK and then sealed her in, setting the code so only they could open the room before they went to let Sarah out of her cell and break the news to her.

Considering the affect the news would probably have on Sarah, and all their lives, Casey asked Kathleen to go and look after Jaqui and Piotr so that Chuck could come down to the bunker, and called Ellie and Mary down at the same time. Casey quietly took Ellie in to check over Jill before re-locking the room and going back to the conference room. Stefan was told that something was going on and he'd be filled in afterwards, but it was too dangerous for him to be in the bunker for the discussions, in case the prisoner heard anything which may give his identity away. When they were all there Carina gave Casey a look to ask whether he wanted her to take it but he shook his head and started in.

Casey explained about the fact that Sarah had made a tail on her earlier that day, they'd let them follow Sarah back until she was out of the line of fire, then took the person who was following her. He looked at Chuck and said "It was Jill Roberts". Chuck went to speak but Casey held up his hand and told him that it got worse and continued, saying that when they started to question her she made certain claims that set Sarah off, so he and Carina took her out of the interrogation and continued it without her. Sarah interjected at that point that she'd gone psycho and they locked her in a holding cell, to which Chuck's shocked look was alternating between her and Casey. Now Casey was at the point where he really didn't want to continue, Carina said "John" in a quiet, restrained voice, but he shook his head and said that he'd do it, drawing a breath before telling them everything that Jill had told them about what she did and why, without repeating her comments about Sarah or the twins.

When Casey finished talking there was a stunned silence in the room, no-one said a thing for 5-10 minutes as they tried to digest what they'd just been told. Mary asked if they were sure that the child was Chuck's, and Carina replied that they'd have to do DNA tests, of course, but Jill's confidence that he'd pass any and all DNA tests made it fairly certain. Mary next asked if they knew where the child was, and Carina replied again that she'd convinced her to tell them where he was. Throughout this, Chuck and Sarah said nothing, just sat there clenching each other's hands. Ellie looked across the table at them and asked what they wanted to do about this. Chuck looked up and shared a look with Sarah before saying that Jill would have to be dealt with, but the boy hadn't done anything and he shouldn't have have to pay for what his mother had done (at that Sarah quietly said that his mother's sins are her's, and not his, Chuck looked at her and she smiled and nodded to show that she agreed with him and leaned in to give him a quick kiss), so he would like to work out a way to look after the boy if they could.

Carina spoke up at that point to say that there was one possibility if they could get the approvals they needed and everyone was OK with it. She was far more reserved and vulnerable than any of them had ever seen her at that point as she went on to explain that Sarah was the only one who knew this, but due to things that had happened to her on missions, she couldn't have children. When she was an operative that had never been an issue, as she never had any wish to have them, and the fact that she couldn't get pregnant from what she did was an advantage. Now that she was out of that world, however, and seeing Chuck and Sarah's children, and Clara, she was missing the fact that she couldn't have that. She stopped to wipe tears away and Sarah went around the table to hold her as she continued, saying that if it was possible, it wouldn't upset anyone and the boy was happy with the idea, she'd like to adopt him and give him a home and a new life. Sarah and Chuck shared a look and a smile across the table and Sarah lifted Carina's chin to make her look at Chuck, to see that he was happy with the idea, she smiled back at Chuck and then buried her face in Sarah's shoulder.

The others were a little stunned with the idea of Carina adopting Chuck's bastard son conceived using stolen sperm by his psycho, traitorous ex-girlfriend, but they could accept that it was, indeed, the "right" thing to do for the boy, and they shuddered to think about what sort of life that he'd had so far, as some of them had an inclining of what Jill would have been doing to make ends meet over the past 8 years.

With that, Casey, Carina and Zondra went to collect Charles from the dive that his mother left him in, after Carina turned to Ellie and told her that the damage to Jill was from them (pointing to herself and Casey), not Sarah, and giving Mary the entry code for the interrogation room so Ellie could tend to her if she wished to. Mary took Ellie in to clean up Jill and tend to her injures (which weren't serious) while Casey and the others were picking up the boy, and Chuck and Sarah went off to a private room to talk.

Chuck was a bit put out that Sarah hadn't let him know what was going on, she accepted that it wasn't totally in keeping with their agreement, but pointed out that she'd immediately contacted Carina to get support, and the team had had her back the whole time. She also pointed out that she'd intended to let him know as soon as she found out what Jill was after, but Casey and Carina had locked her away to prevent her doing anything stupid after Jill dropped her bombshell, so she couldn't contact him until they let her out, and he was brought into the loop then.

To get both their minds off what was in front of them at the moment, she brought up what she'd been thinking of as she was heading back to the house, that she should replace the Shooting Brake with something safe like he had, and asked how long he thought it'd take to get another Odyssey like his built. Chuck laughed at that, which prompted a look from her which choked the laugh off very quickly as he explained that he'd had two pretty much identical ones built at the same time, but he hadn't suggested it to her because, well, she could hurt him for making a suggestion like that. That got a laugh from Sarah and lifted the mood quite a bit, as did his other suggestion that she keep the Shooting Brake, they both loved that car and it was irreplaceable, so they could just move the SUV somewhere else, if no-one else wanted it they could just leave it in the CI parking garage for use when necessary, after all the Odysseys were as good as the SUV except for off-road. School finished around that time, so they hopped in Chuck's Odyssey and went to pick up Yvonne and Zack, leaving them with Kathleen when they got back.

When Casey and the girls got back with Charles, they sat down with him and explained what was going on, as well as they could with an eight year old, but the harsh life he'd had to live with his mother had made him grow up all too fast, so he understood what they were saying far better than a boy his age should. Sarah could relate to him better than the others could, she hadn't had the same life as he had, but she'd been dragged into the adults' world all too soon as well, so she could communicate with him better than the others could. When they'd talked it over with him and he seemed OK with things, he went up to sit with Kathleen, Zondra (as he was an unknown so they wanted to make sure that Kathleen and the kids were safe), and the kids while the others set up a teleconference with the General to determine the fate of Jill and Charles.

The General was just as shocked as they were about what Jill had done, and promptly set plans in motion to get her transferred to a supermax black site where she would remain for the rest of her life. She was concerned about Carina's wish to adopt Charles, mainly because she didn't think that Carina had had a chance to think it through properly yet. She compromised by starting on getting the approval process done, but insisting that Carina talk to a counsellor about it, and also talk to Jeff, as it would affect his life as well, given that they were a couple nowadays. Carina had talked to Jeff a little already and he said that he was fine with the idea, but she agreed to both conditions.

When the agents came to take Jill away, she wanted to talk to Charles, but they were worried that she'd say to him so her request was denied. She was told that she could write him a letter. The thing was, in all that she said about him, she didn't give any indication that she thought of him as her child, her attitude seemed more that he was tool to be used for her purposes. On that basis, they thought it was best for Charles to keep her away from him.

Carina had asked Charles what he thought about being adopted by her (and Jeff possibly), and he was happy with the idea as it looked like he'd have a lot nicer and more caring life with her than he'd had to date. After he'd spent time with his half brothers and half sisters (though he didn't know that's what they were yet) and Carina showed him around their house and what his room would be, he was ecstatic. He'd be living in luxury, especially compared to the way he'd loved up until now and what his mother's "boyfriends" had been like. So, when the General came back to get confirmation that they wanted to adopt Charles she got a whole hearted agreement that Charles would be adopted by Carina Miller and Jeffrey Barnes.

There were still lots of details to be sorted out out yet, and Charles would have to go through batteries of aptitude tests to determine his placement in school (he'd be going to the same school as Yvonne, Zack and Clara), but with his parents' intelligence they had no doubts that he'd do well once he settled in, and he now had a caring home and the chances in the world that he deserved, so at least one good thing had come of this.


	2. Mommy Dearest 2

**So we get another visit from Douchbags of Christmas past, Carina learns to be a mother and Chuck tries to work out how to handle being there for the son he never knew he had. NB: If you've never been in that position, it's a trip down the rabbit hole.**

**Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters, yada, yada...**

Charlie's DNA results came back to confirm that Chuck was his father, as expected, and it was no surprise that his placement test results were right up there, almost as high as Yvonne and Zach's, as his mother was a head case, but brilliant in her own right. Charlie was academically challenged, as he'd never been to school (being dragged around from flop house to flop house will do that to you), but luckily at his age it wouldn't be that difficult for him to catch up. Chuck had used his influence and money to get Charlie into the appropriate classes for his level, and they all spent a lot of time working with him to help him catch up. They felt guilty that he wasn't being given the time to just be a kid, but he hadn't had that before, either, and he was happy spending his time with people who were being nice to him and who seemed to care about him, getting excited when he reached his goals on each piece of work, so he put a lot of effort in so he could make them happy, and basked in all the hugs and kisses he was getting. It really was the happiest he'd ever been.

One thing that he couldn't understand at first was why Carina called him Chuckles, like she did Uncle Chuck, he asked her why one day while she was happy and distracted and she automatically answered that it was because he was so much like his father, before she realised what she'd said. She changed the subject to distract him (being a top spy is a good skillset to have as a parent, who'd have known?), and sent him to play with the kids before going over to Chuck and Sarah's to talk about the slip-up she'd just made. Chuck's face dropped when she told him but Sarah laughed, Chuck asked her how she could laugh about this and she just said that it had to come out sooner than later, as it was obvious who's son he was. Chuck's face made it apparent that it wasn't obvious to everyone so she dragged him over to the window to look at the kids playing outside, pointing out that Charlie had his hair, his eyes, and his nature, Charlie was a bigger version of Piotr with slightly darker skin tone, so much so that most people would pick Charlie as Piotr's brother over Zach. Chuck looked at her and asked if she was upset about that, but she shook her head, reminding him that his mother's sins were her's, not his, and he was a wonderful boy who deserved to know his father. That led Carina to broach another sensitive subject, whether Charlie could call Chuck Dad if he wanted to? Chuck looked at Sarah and she nodded, saying that of course she didn't have an issue with it, he was his son, so Chuck gave her his Sarah smile and hugged her, telling Carina that that would be fine if he wanted to.

They called Charlie in and sat him down to discuss the matter with him, trying to explain why things had happened without letting their feelings about his mother come out. Charlie looked up at Chuck and asked tentatively what he should call him, so Chuck knelt down in front of him with a smile and said that he could call him anything he wanted, Chuck, Uncle Chuck, Dad, it was up to him. Carina interjected from the side "But not Uncle Daddy, please, that's just too much like an Appalachian cliché." which made Sarah crack up as Chuck glared at her. Charlie just looked confused and Chuck grinned at him, telling him that Carina was being silly as he gave him a hug, kissing him on the top of the head when he wrapped his arms around his neck.

Now that Charlie had been told who his father was, they sat their kids down to try to explain that Charlie was their brother, he had another mother and he hadn't been in their lives before but he was living with Carina and Jeff now and she was going be his mother. It was more difficult than it had been with Charlie as they were younger and hadn't been forced to grow up too early like he had, but they accepted that they had another big brother readily, and there were tears in Chuck's eyes as he saw the happy confusion on Charlie's face when they ran up to hug him and proudly tell him that he was their brother.

Things settled in for Charlie after that, it didn't take him long to decide to call Chuck, Daddy Chuck, and that made it an easy step to Mommy Carina and then Mommy for Carina, but the one who was possibly the most touched was Jeff when Charlie started calling him Daddy, he had tears in his eyes as he hugged the little boy.

Charlie hadn't managed to escape his past, though, he had terrible nightmares most nights, Carina often woke to hear him screaming and ran in to comfort him. There was a name that he often called out in his worst nightmares and it chilled Carina's blood, Bryce. This happened a number of times before Carina tried to ask Charlie who Bryce was. Charlie clammed up when she mentioned the name, only saying that he was his mother's boyfriend who had been around quite a bit and that he hadn't been nice when Carina tried to prise more information out of him. Carina dropped the subject and comforted him when she saw how upset he was about it, but went to see Chuck about it the next day when Charlie was at school. Chuck's reaction to the name and the context it came up in was pretty much the same as Carina's. The first thing he did was to call Sarah and Casey into the discussion, then they called the General to ask if she had any knowledge of Bryce returning after he was taken from the Intersect facility, and when she said no, basically asked her in code to give him leave to do a clandestine investigation of the systems to find any records relating to Bryce. She got his point well enough, as if she started asking questions openly, any off the books actions or records would be buried too deep to find, so she agreed on the proviso that anything found would be shared with her.

Chuck immediately started searching all systems that he could get into for any references to Bryce, part of his concerns were about Bryce and the personality changes that Charlie's fears seemed to indicate, but he was also concerned about his father. He talked to Sarah about it when they were alone and they agreed that Bryce, Shaw and his father all seemed to have changed when they were brought back, Bryce had moments where he seemed like he was, but generally he was more arrogant and erratic and, well, less human than he'd been back at Stanford or when Sarah had known him. Shaw had been hard to read before he was told about his wife, and worse afterwards, but when he came back he was basically a delusional, psychotic robot, hardly sane or human at all. When his father came back he was more erratic than before, but he was closest to what he'd been than the others were, especially after they suppressed the Intersect and took that load off him.

What it seemed to come down to was that they were all affected by the revival process, and in the back of his head Chuck thought part of that may have been related to how long they were "out" before they were revived, the first time around, Bryce had to be extracted and taken back to a Ring facility to be revived, Shaw spent an unknown time in the river before he was found, recovered and brought back to be revived, while his father was killed right at a Ring facility, that could have all been planned with the equipment ready and waiting for Shaw's stage show, so the delay from when he was shot to when he was revived could have been a matter of minutes rather than hours like it probably was for the others, which could well explain why the affect on him seemed far less than it had been on the others. The fact remained though that there were notable changes, and Chuck worried about him. Given that they still thought he was the Intersect at that point, it was conceivable that the Ring would have revived him, but what Bryce would be like now after two of these experiences (if it was him) was very much a worry, he could be something far worse than Shaw had been, and if so he would have to be dealt with.

What Chuck found was that Bryce had obviously been revived again, as there were records of him in the Ring files that Chuck had stored, as well as elsewhere in other systems. The references to him indicated someone who was unpredictable and violent, and most were afraid of him. When the Ring was believed to be taken down the first time, Bryce took advantage of the confusion to disappear, and resurfaced as a freelance enforcer for the various mob families and cartels, always in demand due to his reputation for brutal efficiency and ability to always achieve his goals. There were also records to show that that was where he re-connected with Jill, as she'd been doing "work" for some of the same organisations, and he'd probably helped her track them down (he was a far better spy than she ever was). With confirmation that he was back, and he was obviously as violent as Charlie remembered him to be, the question of what to about him came to the fore. They had a brief discussion with the General, hampered by the exposure of discussing it over government controlled systems, and then came up with a birthday party invitation as an excuse to send a plane to pick up her and Roan so they could attend.

When they sat down in the bunker conference room, the mood was grim, most of them knew what the inevitable outcome would be, even Chuck, he wanted Bryce locked up to protect others from him, but knew that that would be a difficult and costly exercise, and keeping him locked up would be difficult, Bryce had been a top spy, and he still had all those skills, but without any shred of sanity or humanity to control his actions any more. They knew that the only viable choice was to eliminate Bryce, but Chuck was still scrabbling for an alternative because, well because he was Chuck. He asked if they could talk to Jill to see if they could get any information from her which may affect the decision, and went cold when the General started evading, then said that that wouldn't be possible as she'd been killed in a fight at the prison. He just looked at her, knowing that Jill had been eliminated as a loose end, probably at her orders, and then stood up and left without a word. He was angry at himself, that he still believed that better solutions could be chosen over the expediency of the permanent solutions that the intelligence community had always preferred, and knew that they wouldn't be in this position if his wishes hadn't been factored into Jill's treatment the first time, but it was a slap in the face to be reminded that even those who he regarded as family were making these calls to clean up the situations around them.

Sarah came after him a few minutes later to make sure he was OK, well not OK but handling it. Roan also came up and talked over the matter with them, not trying to gloss over what Diane did, but to explain what happened when people like Jill had a chance to impact the lives of others, she wasn't as bad as what Bryce obviously was now, but look at what she'd done to Charlie, her own son. Given who she was, she would have tried to use her knowledge of Chuck and the rest of the Clan to make mileage for herself, and that could have destroyed their lives. Chuck just nodded and went to the armoury to gear up. Sarah followed him, asking what he was doing, even though she knew quite well what he was planning to do. When he responded that he would clean up his own mess this time she started to get her own gear ready but he stopped her, saying that she had to stay with the kids. They stood there at an impasse for while until Zondra pushed her out of the way and said that she'd go with Chuck, looking Chuck in the eye as she told him that he wasn't going alone. They all knew that Chuck would try to talk Bryce down first, and only take him out when he tried to kill him, but he was determined to give him one last chance before he was put down, so Chuck nodded his acquiescence to Zondra, not looking at Sarah as he walked out. Casey made Sarah look at him before he told her that Chuck needed to do this, to give Bryce a chance to prove his humanity, Chuck wouldn't be able to handle it any other way. Sarah nodded with tears in her eyes and left, to go to their room and cry.

Zondra wasn't sure why Chuck took the SUV from their garage rather than one of their regular cars, but she wasn't about to argue with him at the moment, he was on the edge and he didn't need any distractions if he was going to get through this.

When they located Bryce, he was in a penthouse hotel suite, Bryce had no trouble recognising Chuck (even though Chuck was having trouble recognising much of the Bryce he'd known), and after blatantly checking out Zondra, he just threw the other women and hangers on who were in the suite out. Chuck tried to engage Bryce in a discussion, but Bryce was having trouble keeping on the topic, it was surreal, as though Bryce was playing out the script of an old spy movie, old western, or a combination of both.

At first he hit on Zondra in the most blatant way possible, running most of the plays from the seduction school handbook on her, but it was disjointed, as though he'd forgotten that they were supposed to be options (IE: If the indicator is this, you use this play, or if this then you use the other one), and he kept pushing multiple plays at her even when they conflicted with each other. He seemed to have all the data, but the logic processes were missing or malfunctioning. The primary intent seemed to be to try and prove his dominance over Chuck by taking away the woman that he was with, and hence put him off balance, but even a moderately functional Bryce would have known that a) the plays weren't working, b) Chuck wouldn't be attached to any woman other than Sarah, and c) would have noted that Chuck was wearing his wedding ring, but Zondra wasn't wearing a wedding ring. Bryce was getting more erratic when Zondra didn't respond to his plays, and Chuck didn't falter. So when Bryce grabbed Zondra's arm and started pulling her towards the bedroom and Chuck stopped him, the situation moved into the next phase.

It was apparent that in Bryce's head, he'd gotten the proper response from Chuck and that he now had him where he wanted him. Chuck kept trying to talk him down, telling him that he couldn't go on the way he was, and that he needed to come in with them to let them get him some help, but Bryce was still trying to run the plays in his head, except that they'd apparently changed to tactical scenarios and gunfights now. It was inevitable where it was going, but Chuck kept trying, right up to the point where Bryce obviously thought he'd distracted Chuck enough and drew his pistol to shoot him, but he was no match for Chuck with the Intersect, when it was obvious that Bryce was committed to shooting him, Chuck drew his own pistol and finished him. As he looked down at Bryce's body, it was obvious that the man that Chuck, or any of them, had known was gone, what had been left in fact was a rabid animal that needed to be put down.

On the way back Chuck swung by the storage garage where the second Odyssey was stored to pick it up, he'd explained to Zondra on the way that he hadn't wanted to take one of their regular cars in there, he wanted to keep them separated from that world as much as possible, and that they'd agreed that they would be using the second Odyssey now, so he picked it up and had Zondra follow him back to the CI offices to leave the SUV there before they went home in the Odyssey. As they got close to home, Zondra asked him if he was OK, and he shook his head, but said that it had to be done, and now it was.

**A/N: I realise that the Bryce/Revival segments have a distinct Frankenstein flavour about them, but that was how it panned out. damn Igor was supposed to keep an eye on that sort of thing, just can't get good assistants nowadays.**


	3. Who's Your Daddy?

**Usual disclaimer for the Land of Litigation, no rights to any characters.**

In the six months since he'd come to them, Charlie had settled in and become a bright, happy boy. He'd kept getting the nightmares for a while, but Carina had had a Eureka moment and set up a sound system in his room to continuously play the recordings of Chuck singing at night, and his nightmares immediately started dropping off. Chuck's music was soothing for everyone, but Charlie's reaction seemed to show that Carina's intuition had been right, and hearing his father's voice did wonders to relax him and make him feel safe. No-one could think of a way to tell him that his mother was dead without upsetting him, so they agreed to wait until he asked about her, and then try to find the best way to tell him. It did cross Carina's mind to tell him that Bryce couldn't hurt him any more, in hope that he wouldn't have more nightmares about him, but decided that mentioning Bryce would probably just make things worse, and telling him what happened was totally inappropriate for an eight year old boy, he was far more mature than he should have had to be at his age, but they were trying to give him a better life where he could be the little boy that he was, so he was better off not knowing about any of that.

Carina spent a lot of time talking to Sarah and Chuck, Ellie, Kathleen, and Mary to get advice about how to be a better mother for Charlie. She was surprised when Mary said not to use her as a role model because she was a terrible mother, but she did tell her a lot of things about when Chuck was little which were helpful (and which she shared with Sarah when she had a chance, as that sort of history about Chuck was gold to Sarah). Carina was trying to find her feet and look after Charlie as best she could, and Jeff supported her as well as he could, neither of them had expected this or knew what to do, but they wanted to give him the best life that they could.

Things had settled down as well as could be expected once the incidents in regard to Jill and Bryce were done with. Chuck hadn't forgiven the General for making the traditional choice in regard to dealing with Jill, and in particular for lying to them about what she did, but while cool, their relationship was workable, so she and Roan were still coming for Jaqui and Piotr's fourth birthday party. Sarah was still hurt by the way that Chuck had shut her out over Bryce, and that he'd risked himself the way that he did, but she could understand his position.

Sarah did get a laugh a few weeks after Chuck brought the second Odyssey home. She'd started using the Odyssey whenever she was transporting the kids, as well as most other times, and when she got to the garage to one morning to take Yvonne and Zack to school she found that the license plates had been changed on both Odysseys, to "HIS" and "HERS". They hadn't discussed the matter after what happened with Bryce, but it was obvious how much it still affected Chuck, so it was a relief when she saw the plates, as it showed that at least Chuck's sense of humour was still in place after all that had happened.

For all the upheaval of the events of the previous six months or so, Carmichael Industries still had work commitments to honour, and a solid workload, so they were pretty much flat out most of the time. In a way that was good as it didn't leave much time for contemplation which would probably take them down the rabbit hole, but it also meant that they had limited free time to relax with the kids. Because of that, Chuck and Sarah were determined to make the Jaqui and Piotr's fourth birthday party a fun filled weekend for all of them. As usual, Diane and Roan flew in Friday night, the main indication that tensions were still high being that they stayed with Casey, Kathleen and Alex, rather than Chuck and Sarah as they normally did.

Over the weekend, everyone was managing to put the conflicts behind them and have a good time with the kids, until Saturday night when Sarah went to get something from the fridge in Casey's place, and found Roan and Josie in each other's arms. Sarah just stared at the two of them in what appeared to be a very intimate embrace, then snapped and lunged forward to pull him around by the shoulder and drive her knee into his groin with enough force to lift him off his feet. She stood over him as he writhed in pain on the floor and swore at him for being a disgusting pig who'd fooled her into thinking that he was different from the other sick bastards out there, until she had to break off and defend herself when Josie attacked her. She and Josie circled each other and she quietly informed Josie that they'd be terminating her services immediately, as they didn't want her type around their families, until Roan managed to get his breath back enough squeeze out "Stop, stop, please stop", at which Josie immediately disengaged and stood back, looking down at him with concern. They separated enough to forestall any sudden attacks as they waited for Roan to recover enough to speak, but what he said when he did recover wasn't something that Sarah ever expected to hear.

Roan gingerly sat up and looked from one to the other, wincing from the pain of having to move, and then said "This isn't what you think Sarah, and I'm sorry, we should have told you this a long time ago, but please meet my daughter, Josephine." Sarah stared at him for about 20 seconds and then looked at Josie, saying "Daughter?" She shook her head as she looked back down at Roan, asking whether Diane knew about her? When Josie snorted and said "Yeah, I think Mom knows about me." she whipped her head back, mouthing "Mom?" Josie nodded with a grin that showed quite clearly she WAS Roan's daughter, then Sarah looked back at Roan who at least had the decency to look guilty as he nodded and said "Yes, Diane is Josephine's mother."

They helped him up and sat him in a chair at the table, then Josie found a bag of frozen peas in the freezer while Sarah texted Chuck "Casey's kitchen, now!". When Chuck got there, he found Roan sitting at the table gingerly holding a bag of frozen peas to his groin with Josie hovering over him, and Sarah standing a ways off, looking furious. Chuck looked from the pair at the table, to Sarah, and Sarah growled that some introductions were in order. When Roan nodded, at least Chuck knew who to look at as he went to Sarah to hold her hand. Roan gave them a strained smiled and said "Forgive me for not getting up, Charles, but I am a little indisposed at the moment, if you please, I would like to introduce you to my daughter, Josephine." Chuck looked at Sarah, stunned, and she gave him a tight lipped smile as she told him "It gets better ."

The next voice came from the living room, as Diane stepped into the conversation, saying "Yes, I'm afraid that we've been keeping the information about our daughter from you, but in our defence we've kept her identity secret from the entire intelligence community and the rest of the world until now and it was a very hard habit to break." Diane looked at Roan holding the frozen peas to his groin with a raised eyebrow, to which Roan explained that Sarah had found them in what she believed to be a compromising position and showed her outrage that he would play around behind his partner's back (inclining his head to Diane). Diane gave a wry grin as she turned to Sarah and thanked her for looking out for her.

Sensing that this would be an interesting discussion, Chuck went to the cupboard where he knew Casey stashed his bottle of Johnny Walker Black and brought it to the table as Sarah collected six tumblers (as she expected that Casey would have cottoned onto the fact that something was up by now and would be turning up soon). Chuck apologised to Roan for the fact that there wasn't any gin and Roan waved off his apology with a smile, by which time the person they were waiting for turned up to ask what was going on. To avoid dragging things out any more, Sarah told him that they'd just found out that Josie was Roan and Diane's daughter, and that they were about to explain it to them. Casey nodded and looked at Roan holding the peas to his groin, to which Roan sighed and said "It was a minor misunderstanding." With that, they all sat down at the table to hear the story, Sarah looked at Josie as she sat down, ad Josie said that they'd never told her, either, so she was going to hear this.

Roan, as the natural story teller, launched into the tale, first turning to Chuck and asking if he remembered what he'd told him about Berlin? Chuck nodded and Roan said that that was where it began. Soon after that Diane found out that she was pregnant, but as they'd discussed, they thought that they were going to change the world and neither of them wanted to give up their careers at that point, so some family friends arranged for her to have the equivalent of a "posting to Siberia" for the next 6-12 months to keep her off the radar, it was easily explained away as her being reprimanded for getting involved with a disreputable agent in Berlin (Diane smiled and squeezed his hand). It was easier in those days, as there was no video conferencing or anything like that, so as long as she wasn't being seen by anyone outside of the inner circle, the secret (our wonderful secret, he added, as he reached over to squeeze his daughter's hand) was safe from getting out. Diane had a close cousin on her mother's side who had found out after she was married that, much to her distress, she couldn't have children. She and her husband are wonderful people, and agreed to raise Josephine as their own. (The next part was directed at Josie, as he explained that her mother never wanted to give her up, but they were caught up in the idea that they would be saving the world, and what they were doing meant that being with them was no safe place to be for a baby.)

There was a slight pause as they thought about the impact of their decision and then he went on. When Josephine was born, she went to Diane's cousin, and Diane's family made sure that any and all records that showed that she may have been pregnant were permanently erased. Diane's "exile" was revoked and she came back to D.C. to re-start her career, but she never took long term postings away from where Josephine was, so she could go and see her as much as possible, and I went with her whenever I was in town. When she was in her mid-teens Josephine had a rather bad accident, as she was always a bit of a daredevil (Diane interjected with "I wonder where she got that from?" in a dry tone), and questions were raised when neither of her "parents" had a compatible blood type. Josephine presumed that she was adopted and was getting upset, so her "parents" told her the truth, that "Aunty Diane" and "Uncle Roan" were actually her mother and father, but they worked for the government and didn't think it was safe for her to be around them. (Sarah looked at Diane as she realised that that was why Yvonne and Zack calling her Aunty Diane always affected her the way it did, it reminded her of when Josie was little, Diane caught her eye and nodded.)

After the tears and recriminations were finished, they managed to become a family of sorts, Josephine still lived with the parents that raised her (and did a wonderful job of it), but they could build a relationship with her as her mother and father from that point on. Of course, once she learned what her parents really did she decided to follow in their footsteps and become an agent, and as she got a stubborn streak from somewhere (looking at her mother), that was exactly what she did. (At that point Diane turned to Chuck and said that that was she'd been so grateful for what he'd done, as she'd been afraid for Josie. Josie started to ask what she was talking about but shut up when her mother turned to her with a closed expression that brooked no discussion.)

Once Josie was in "the game", Diane indirectly used her influence to try and keep her away from the worst or most dangerous roles, and then when Carmichael Industries took off and they were taking on extra staff to cover the needs of the business, she made sure that Josie was one of the candidates. Sarah smiled at that point and said that they could thank Chuck for recusing himself from the selection process, otherwise Josie may not have gotten the job. Diane looked confused for a second and then looked at Josie, suddenly realising what she was talking about and grinned, saying, "Ah, yes." Both Roan and Josie were looking confused at that point, but all Diane said was that Chuck had a "type" at one point, and it led to issues sometimes. That didn't clarify the issue much, but Josie remembered something else and turned to Sarah to ask whether she was still fired. Everyone else looked at Sarah then and she went red, saying that she didn't need to worry about that, now that the misunderstanding had been cleared up. As no-one looked any the wiser Josie grinned and said that Dad got damaged for playing up, and she got fired, turning to Casey to explain that Sarah had walked in to find her and her father hugging and misinterpreted what she saw.

After everyone there was caught up on Josie's story, there was a bit of discussion about who else could know. It was a given that everyone who lived within Castle Carmichael (the adults) would need to know as it was feasible that someone would let it slip at some point, but the question about telling Bella was more difficult. She was part of the team, but not quite part of the "family". The question was left to Josie and she ended up saying that the issue had never come up with Bella and she was happy to keep it that Bella just regarded her parents as her only family. As they started to head back to the party, Sarah got Josie to stay until the others had left, so she could explain what her mother had brought up. For everyone's sake she didn't go into detail, just saying that she and others had received specialised seduction training that was unpleasant, and when Chuck found out he tracked the people responsible with her father's help, and dealt with them to ensure that the practice was not continued. Josie had heard enough stories when she was in training to know what she was talking about and just threw her arms around her. After that, they went back to the party with the others.

**A/N: OK, I know that this is fluff in a story which was expected to be all angst, but I've always felt that I was logical for those two to have a love child hidden away somewhere, they'd been an item for decades.**


	4. Woody Will Pay

**Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters etc.**

Chuck and Sarah jumped as Ellie stormed in and threw a packet of documents on the coffee table in front of them, they stopped and looked at each other before Chuck reached for the packet. When they scanned the contents of the packet they understood why she was upset, as the papers were a very detailed lawsuit for the custody of Clara Woodcomb, citing endangerment as the primary cause for the case.

Both Sarah and Chuck went to Ellie to hug her and tell her that they would beat this, so she didn't need to worry, but Ellie was freaking out, these people wanted to steal her daughter. Eventually Chuck took her by the shoulders, looked her in the eye and slowly repeated that they would beat this. She shook him off and said that he couldn't guarantee that, all sorts of things could go wrong, then he smiled at her and asked her who she was talking to. That made her stop and look at him, which let him point out that the Bartowski family had the resources to fight anything, they had access to information that almost no-one else had, they had almost unlimited funds to run the campaign, and if all else failed they had a pretty important trump card, at that she just looked at him in confusion, so he pulled out his phone and brought up the contact list, selecting one and turning the phone to show her, the name of the contact was POTUS, and the picture was of the President. Ellie looked from him to Sarah asking whether he really had a direct contact to the President on his phone? Sarah nodded, pointing out that the details couldn't be discussed, but their team had done so much before and after they left the CIA that they had a standing offer from him to call him if they needed help with any issues. Chuck took Ellie by the shoulders again and re-iterated that they would beat this, and this time Ellie looked hopeful that they could.

When they went through the paperwork, it was obvious that the Woodcombs had been working on this ever since Ellie divorced Devon and got custody, over 6 years before. They'd been tracking the entire Bartowski family, Carmichael Industries and their associates to gather dirt that they could use against them for the entire time. The size of the exercise raised another question in regard to where they'd got the funds, because they were an old money family but they weren't the Hiltons or the Rockerfellers, so how could they afford this? They scanned all the paperwork into the system to work on it more effectively, and one thing that came out almost at once was that they had to have gotten records out of the agency to have any inkling of many of the points cited, so they called up the General to discuss how that happened. Chuck was ranting a little about what the Woodcombs were trying to do, and going on about how these privileged families thought they could get away with anything because they felt so entitled, but after a while he realised that everyone else had gone quiet and looked up. The others were trying to keep a straight face and/or climb under the table, except for Casey, who was smirking at him across the table, then he turned to the screen to find the General pinning him with a withering stare (it actually looked like she was trying for one of Sarah's death stares). It probably didn't help that Roan was in the room with her and he was loving every word, it was fairly obvious that Diane's family never approved of him and he lived for the chance to stick it to them, and anyone like them. At that point Chuck remembered that she was from one of those privileged families, so he apologised with a muttered "No offence General", to get a reply of "Some taken!" before she relented a little and indicated for him to continue with the relevant information.

Chuck was on a roll after that, showing the points and incidents that the Woodcombs were citing as the basis of their claim of endangerment, listing treason and murder charges and everything the other side had been throwing at the for the last decade, until he got frustrated and said that they'd even cited the time he was committed to the CIA mental institution. At that point he suddenly stopped, quietly repeating that they cited the time that he was committed as an evil grin formed over his face. The others couldn't work out why he was regarding that as something good until he looked up at the General and repeated again that they cited the records of him being committed and her eyes widened as a grim smile grew on her face. Chuck immediately started throwing document images up on screen one after the other, and the General, Sarah and Casey were making notes the whole way through. At the end Casey whistled and said that they were in a heap of trouble, with the closest thing to a full grin any of them had ever seen on his face.

Ellie looked confused, asking how it could be a good thing that they were in trouble, Casey looked contrite, realising that she misunderstood what he'd said and apologised, saying that it was the Woodcombs who were in serious trouble. Ellie still looked confused so Chuck took over, telling her (and the others who hadn't cottoned on yet) that to cite the instances that they did in the lawsuit, the Woodcombs and their lawyers had to be in possession of a lot of highly classified documents and records (at that point the General piped up to say that a significant portion of those files were actually under presidential seal, and couldn't be released except under his direct orders, so yes, the Woodcombs and anyone else who had accessed those files or documents were in serious trouble indeed).

They still had to prepare a case, but due to classified nature of the material being used against them, at least part of the legal representation on their side had to be provided by the Government, as no-one else could be cleared high enough. The CIA and NSA traced all documentation requests relating to them over the period cited (decades, as references were made to Frost and Orion, driving more nails in their coffins), and went to the President's office to get confirmation of any and all authorisations that had been given for the records under presidential seal for the period cited as well. Meanwhile Chuck and Stefan back traced all electronic accesses to the records, building an image of what had been accessed from where.

As well as addressing the national security issues and defending the accusations relating to them, they had to address the "normal" issues, and prepare a basis for counter suit, so they engaged the best legal representation possible (explaining to the partners under very strict non-disclosure agreements (the type that involved incarceration if leaked) what the separation of duties had to be if they wished to protect their firm and representatives from significant amounts of their records etc locked away), and some of the best investigators available to build an image of the Woodcomb family, and in particular Devon, Woody and Honey Woodcomb, as the principals in the suit against Ellie and the Bartowski family. As with the classified materials, Chuck and Stefan ran all the electronic investigations, where necessary pointing their investigators in the direction they had to go to get any corroborating evidence needed.

The fact that they could throw as much money as needed to put an army on the job was a significant help in collecting the information they needed inside the small time window that the Woodcombes had given them before the court date. They had comprehensive records of the goings on of Devon and the rest of the Woodcomb family, the illegal agreements between the Woodcombes and their friends and associates (including the criminal elements that they went to to buy information) to obtain the dirt to use against Ellie and her family, and the sources of the funds that they used to build the case against them. The Woodcombs were so sloppy and disreputable that the case may have been won even without the national security element against them.

When the day in court arrived (on the Woodcombs' home turf), the Woodcombs were aghast to find that the judges weren't the friend that they had arranged for, and that that "worthy" individual was answering questions in regard to impropriety and misconduct at that moment. The court was mainly filled with Woodcomb family and supporters, which worked well for the government as everyone had to be detained and questioned in regard to national security issues relating to the materials obtained to be used against Ellie. Once the court was sealed (and cellphone jammers were activated to prevent anyone raising any alarms), government agents descended on all Woodcomb and associates' properties and holdings, and the law firms that they'd engaged to represent them, to locate and secure the highly classified materials that they'd obtained to build their case, and anything else that they should not be in possession of.

Those not directly involved in the court proceedings were removed to secure facilities for questioning about their knowledge of the classified materials, while the court case proceeded. The judges allocated to the case had been given prior warning (from the President, no less) to ensure that they and their officers of the court did not access any of the classified material that was in question. The government legal representatives screened all materials and removed anything which may compromise the position of the judges or officers of the court before returning the remainder to them so that they could proceed. The remaining material represented less than 20% of those that had been submitted by the Woodcombs' legal team.

The Woodcombs had lost their smug arrogance and were looking exceedingly worried, as were their legal team. Devon looked mainly confused, which made sense to Chuck and Sara, at least, as when they'd gone though all the information they collated, it appeared that the main drivers for this had been his parents, because they were too arrogant to countenance losing to Ellie, or anyone else. If Devon had been enough of a man to stop them he may have gotten himself out of this, but he'd just caved in to them like he always had, so now he was right there in the shit with them. It was really no surprise that he hadn't had the backbone to stand up to them, as the records showed that he'd spent the past 6-7 years basically wallowing in booze, parties, cheap tarts, strippers and hookers whenever he wasn't working, hardly the lifestyle to build moral fortitude.

The government legal team ran through the points based on classified materials and provided the judges with the government statements on those points, advising that if the judges wished to go through the measures which would be required to access those materials, they (and only them) would be allowed to sight redacted documents within a secure facility to satisfy themselves of the veracity of what they were advising him here. Given the warnings that they'd received, the judges waived this requirement and accepted the formal statements from the government team. The Woodcombs' legal team tried to argue that they had to have the right to present their case on these points (as the majority of their case was based on these points), but were shut down by the judges, who stated that they would not allow themselves or their officers to be compromised in that manner.

Once the classified issues were addressed, the government team handed off to Ellie's legal team to handle the remainder of the case.

The Woodcombs' legal team presented the remaining points raised against Ellie and her family (as representative of the environment that Clara was living in) and then Ellie's legal team responded to these points in the established manner. It was expected that these additional points had been added as "filler" (relying on the issues that the government had taken off the table to drive the case) as they were all rather weak, and not at all difficult for Ellie's legal team to refute. They included general attempts to represent the nature of the work that the family was involved in as presenting a danger to Clara, but could not show any evidence that this work brought danger into the home environment at all.

Once the Woodcomb's case against Ellie, the Bartowskis and Carmichael Industries was answered, Ellie's legal team presented their counter case against the Woodcombs and their associates. The fact that Police records and civil suits among other things provided reams of evidence to paint a poor picture of the character of most of the Woodcomb family and their associates didn't help the Woodcomb case at all. Nor did the evidence of their criminal associations, to the extent of mob families loaning the Woodcombs the extensive funding to mount their case against Ellie, and the illegal activities involved in obtaining the evidence that they tried to use in the case, which involved both paying the mob to steal records, and two senators who misused their positions to falsify orders to get information about the Bartowskis. In addition to those points, evidence was presented that the Woodcombs had run themselves to the brink of bankruptcy (or beyond) to fund their vendetta against Ellie and her family, which would leave them ill equipped to raise and support a child.

In the case that came out, Devon was shown to be largely an ineffectual pawn of his parents, but it was clearly shown that the Woodcomb environment would be neither wholesome nor safe for Clara, while they had presented copious evidence and affidavits to show that the environment where Clara was living with her mother was safe.

Given the weakness of the Woodcombs' case against Ellie and the Bartowskis, and the strength of Ellie's team's countercase against the Woodcombs, the outcome of the custody hearing was no surprise, in that sole custody was given to Ellie and there was no option for the Woodcombs to appeal against this, ever.

They had also managed to spare Clara the ordeal of being present in the court (which the Woodcombs had been insisting on). Clara had stayed with Kathleen and Alex while Casey and the Bartowskis were in court to present the case and answer any issues, so she had a fun time sightseeing and shopping with Kathleen and Alex instead of being traumatised by the arguments in court. This issue was raised in court by the Woodcomb's legal team as evidence that Ellie did not meet their requirements, and backfired seriously on the Woodcombs as the Judges called for evidence to support putting a small child through that ordeal, evidence that they obviously couldn't provide.

Once the custody hearing was completed, the Woodcombs were taken into custody to answer the national security and criminal matters arrayed against them. What came out after questioning all parties was that the majority of the information was obtained via the two senators who were now incarcerated, or purchased via their mob connections, however the most sensitive files had been sent to them anonymously. The only information that they could get on the source of those files was the drop off point and a phone number that they'd had at one point, and both of those were cold leads.

Devon ended up getting a short sentence for his illegal actions in the proceedings, and a court order to stay away from Ellie and Clara for the rest of his life. His parents, however, got considerably longer sentences, especially his father, but there were serious doubts about how long Woody would survive in prison. A few other family members received short sentences, as did the corrupt judge that they'd tried to use to push the case through, but the senators were in for the long term, and so were a number of senior members of the mob family that the Woodcombs had been buying information off and engaging for other criminal activities, and this was why people doubted that Woody would last in prison, as he'd turned on his mob connections and testified against them, there was little chance that the mob would let that go unpunished.

Ellie and the family returned home as soon as the custody findings were handed down. Chuck, Sarah and Casey were kept in the loop about what was happening with the Woodcombs and their associates, but they didn't pass any of that on to Ellie (or anyone other than Mary and Carina). The primary concern that they were left with was the anonymous source of those sensitive files, as it was apparent that someone was coming after them, someone who could get highly sensitive materials without leaving any notable traces of where they'd been or how they'd accessed the information. Someone like that coming after you was reason to be concerned, and they were.

**A/N: I realise that this one is a little sloppy, sorry, but I mainly just wanted to cover off the question of Devon that comes up. I didn't like him and wanted him out of my "world", but I didn't think he was evil, but rather primarily weak and self centred, a momma's boy. His parents, however, were something else, I loathed them. I also realise that I probably made some Faux Pas in regard to the US legal system, and that the question of "under presidential seal" was probably all wrong, but I hope people understood what I was trying to say.**


	5. Puppet Master 1

**Usual disclaimer, no rights to characters.**

When the police left after answering the bogus domestic violence call at Casey's, Chuck called everyone together for a meeting, with the phrase "Once is happen-stance, twice is coincidence, thrice is certainty" ringing through his head (and making a note to check into the logic processes for uploading information into the Intersect when he had some free time, as that certainly didn't sound like something that would be in anything he chose to read). The first alarm bells had come with the anonymous feed of the most secret files to the Woodcombs to help make a case against Ellie and the Clan, since then they'd been getting fake stolen car reports that resulted in a number of them being pulled over, utilities accounts being cancelled, and now the fake call out for domestic violence at one of their houses (and Casey's at that, the most believable one among them in the role of wife beater to the casual observer). Obviously what they thought when they got the heads up about the anonymous "donation" to the Woodcombs of the files on them was right, someone was coming after them, and they were fairly good. The thing was, the way it was being done had a familiar flavour to it, as if he'd come across it before, but at the same time it was nothing that he could recognise.

When they were all at the table, Chuck ran through what they believed was happening, and that obviously led to the next step, trying to work out who it was. They started throwing up any possible names of people that they'd put away, crossed, or had a falling out with, the idea being to list everyone possible, and then try to narrow it down from there. First name up, of course, was Daniel Shaw, and they flowed from there, they laughed when Jeff added Lester to the list, but thinking on it, his personality would push him in the villain direction, even if they thought he wasn't up to it. Everyone was shocked when Mary threw up Alexei and Vivian Volkoff, but she shrugged and pointed out that Alexei may have taken over Hartley again, and they had to consider that as a possibility. Carina also threw a cat among the pigeons by pointing out that they couldn't rule out anyone they had thought was dead, unless they had actually seen them dead and buried, citing Bryce as proof of that, so with that sobering thought (which turned grim when Sarah immediately added Evelyn Shaw, Sydney Price and Mauser, then scratched Mauser as she'd shot him in the head) the list suddenly got a lot longer. It had been uncomfortable when senior agency people and political figures were being added, but they had to be considered as possibilities, too, as the team hadn't been popular with those who wanted to use them for unethical purposes, and they had refused. The only name that was discussed, purely to agree that she was not a possibility was Diane Beckman, which was crucial as they would need her help if they wanted to achieve this. After a couple of hours they had well over two hundred names, and seeing that list up there was rather daunting.

The next step was to investigate those possibilities who were supposed to be safely locked away in the government's supermax facilities, and the outcome of those investigations gave them a sense of dread, as quite a number of the key suspects were found to be gone, or more to the point to have been replaced with other men or women. The list included Daniel Shaw, the Ring Director, Laszlo Mahnovski, Manoosh Depak, La Ciudad, Sasha Banacheck, Ty Bennett, Gaez (and Amy), Robin Cunnings, the list was long and distinguished. It was apparent that someone was going to a lot of effort to create an organisation that could take on the "proper" intelligence agencies, and win. This potentially changed the motivation for coming after them, they'd been looking at this as a personal vendetta, so they expected that they'd know who was behind it, but if it was actually a rational decision to target the organisation that had been instrumental in taking out most of the opposition to the established intelligence communities, it could be just about anyone.

While this was a setback, though, it didn't invalidate the process they'd been following so far, as it appeared that some, at least, of the ones on their lists may well be part of this new organisation (which may or may not exist), so theoretically, if they could track the people they had listed down, they may lead them to this new organisation. The fact that they didn't have anything solid to go on, other than the fact that a number of people who could be quite useful to a nefarious organisation had been replaced in prison and spirited away was rather frustrating, but what they did have so far obviously meant that there was something going on, and whatever it was, it wouldn't be good.

Their clients were not happy when Carmichael Industries wound up their open contracts and advised them that they would not be able to engage in any new contracts for the foreseeable future. The General filled those peers that she trusted in on what was happening, and got them to go through their equivalents of the supermax facilities to ascertain whether they'd had any similar substitutions as well. Once again, the news was bad, all over the world it appeared that the more effective examples of the enemies of the state had been replaced in prison and spirited away, so the list of people that they were trying to track down grew to over three times what the CI team had started with. It was a bit hard not to feel that they'd always be in the crosshairs of Bad Guys R Us, as whenever they dealt with one threat, another (potentially worse) one seemed to turn up.

This exercise was turning into a repeat of the previous epics, but at least they had the support of the intelligence community, apparently some of them did have intelligence, given that they they could see how big a threat could exist if a new organisation was recruiting most of the major players that they'd been up against. The fact that they'd been going to the extent of removing these people from the most secure facilities without anyone knowing about it showed how much of a threat they were.

The recruiting practices that BGRU had been following made Chuck think seriously about his position on how to deal with people of this nature. He had some long discussions with Sarah and Casey (as the two people he trusted most who had an understanding of this subject), and eventually flew to D.C. for a private conversation with the General. They came away from that in a better place, as far as their own relationship went, as while Chuck still didn't like the idea of eliminating people, he had to accept that the world would be a safer place if some (if not many) of the people on the lists that they were currently working through had been taken out of the equation before this had happened.

He and the General could relate better now that the secret of Josie was out, part of the "Iron Pants" persona that she'd always projected was to keep everyone focused on the idea that she was nothing but a hard nosed military leader, as no-one would expect that character of being a caring mother who was worried about her daughter. That smoke and mirrors act had successfully kept the entire intelligence community from finding out who Josie was for over 20 years. The risks were much higher now, given that the number of people who knew the secret had doubled, but she and Roan (and Josie) had faith in the Carmichael Clan to keep the secret, and her daughter, safe.

As soon as Chuck was back in Castle Carmichael he was back in the swing of things, he hadn't been 100% while he was conflicted about those issues, but now that they were resolved to a large degree he was "all ahead full". One thing that he'd recognised on the way back was the point that Sarah had made (perhaps without realising it), that they could eliminate some of the possibilities for people to have been revived, by determining how they'd been killed, as there was no reviving someone after they'd had their brains blown out. While a morbid subject, it was relevant, as a lot of the most dangerous characters had been thought to be killed in recent years, but if they could identify those who were proven to be dead for a matter of days or weeks, or who were proven to be killed by a bullet to the head, then they could reduce the number that they were searching for. Unfortunately, that just made Sarah and Chuck look at each other as they realised that there was another name that wasn't on the list yet, and Sarah pulled the keyboard over to type in "Nicholas Quinn", they now knew that the Ring had risen again after everyone thought they were taken out, and they had not been involved in the clean up of his body, so that made him another potential revived and possible threat.

The list of those that they were looking for was now well over a thousand, and it was still growing as reports came in from around the world. They were getting some minor tentative hits from the searches, but nothing concrete. As well as chasing those potentially recruited by BGRU, they were trying to trace funding paths, links to the old Ring assets, new connections to officials who had been known to be compromised in the past, anything which could make this more than speculation and help them identify what they were up against.

It took over two months, but they finally started getting some more concrete leads. These leads were mainly related to security camera images that showed some of the people on the lists collecting in given cities in the USA, Russia and Europe, but it gave them areas to concentrate on and chase down leads more aggressively, and also something to hang onto that was saying that they may not just be imagining everything.

One thing that was a concern for Chuck was the fact that among the people who seemed to be involved were Laszlo Mahnovski, Manoosh Depak, Daniel Shaw, and Ricky and Vicky (the Gretas who'd had the Intersect 2.0). Though Shaw's Intersect was supposed to be corrupted by the Omen virus, and Ricky and Vicky were supposed to be suppressed, as Chuck had found after he loaded the Intersect 3.0, the databases appeared to remain in the brain when the Intersect software was suppressed. Therefore, the possibility of having at least three people with the Intersect databases in their heads, plus Manoosh (who'd managed to create a working pseudo Intersect device) and Laszlo (who was a total genius with most technology) potentially come together added up to the possibility of BGRU getting access to the Intersect data.

That scenario could potentially make this organisation more dangerous than any of the previous ones had been. The Ring had had a working form of the Intersect, but it was doubtful that they would have managed to get the full CIA/NSA databases to load into it, Fulcrum didn't even get to the point of a working Intersect (the closest was what Chuck managed to upload, as his brain was the only one capable of accepting that version). If BGRU could come up with technology to allow them to access the Intersect databases residing in the heads of their three Intersect hosts (especially if the accumulated data collected by the Omen virus was actually loaded into Shaw's head before the virus corrupted his Intersect software), the new organisation would potentially have access to data that the rest of the intelligence community had been dreaming about for years.

On top of that, they appeared to have been accumulating the best of the worst for years (if the lists that they were compiling of operatives and specialists who may have joined BGRU was anything close to accurate), and they'd be sure to have a suitably competent horde of second string agents who would support their superiors in any manner required (as they'd almost certainly be disposed of the second they failed to deliver what was required of them).

Given those points, and the indications to date that were that whoever was running this new organisation knew what they were doing (as they'd managed to keep everything under the radar until they started coming after Carmichael Industries), their leadership appeared to be quite effective, another concern for those who were hoping to stop them. The fact that they did make a move against CI now implied that they were about to commence the next significant phase of their operations, and their only mistake was that they appeared to have underestimated Carmichael Industries. (At least Chuck hoped that they'd underestimated his team, and whoever was pulling the strings wasn't just playing them with this manoeuvre, because if that was happening they were in big trouble.)

**A/N: This one will be multiple chapters, probably with other topics slipped in between them sometimes. It will dredge up a plethora of bad guys to be taken care of ;^) Oh and Wilf, I'm betting that you won't see the identity of the Puppet Master coming ;^)**


	6. Puppet Master 2

**Usual disclaimer for the land of litigation, no rights to any characters.**

The search engines were starting to make mileage on the BGRU hunt, they'd tagged images of Ricky and Vicky in the same vicinity as Jane Bentley and Manoosh Depak, so it appeared that the location of BGRU's Intersect efforts may have been determined. Given that Chuck, Sarah and Casey were all well known to them, Carina and Mary were the ones who took the trip up to Chicago to try to tap into the word on what they were doing. If Shaw and Laszlo happened to turn up when they were there, they didn't know Carina or Mary either, so they should be safe from being made by them. If there was any chance of getting Manoosh away from the others, he was the obvious weak link, so Carina may be able to get some intel out of him (just keeping it to flirting), hopefully being able to send him back none the wiser that he'd been manipulated.

Chuck pointed out that if Shaw did turn up, it may actually help them narrow down the location, as even before the whole undead thing, Shaw was extremely egotistical and had to be the one calling the shots, so Shaw would almost certainly end up making a scene if Jane Bentley, a mere woman, put him in his place, telling him to shut up and do what he was told. Given that he was far less stable now than he was before, if Bentley, a mere woman, went all boss lady on him and put him down like the minion he was (and that was almost guaranteed for Bentley), he was pretty sure that Shaw would go ballistic and act out, hopefully making enough "noise" for them to flag and track them down. Casey laughed about what a time Bentley would have if and when Shaw and Laszlo DID turn up, as they were both completely out of their trees, Chuck and Sarah thought about that and looked a little horrified and amused, as one of them was hard to handle, the idea of those two in the same space was a bit terrifying. While Mary and Carina were still en-route to Chicago, the system got another hit that further supported the idea that they were right about BGRU being there for the Intersect, because Dr. Jonas Zarnow was also in Chicago, so they sent his details through to them as well with a background of what he did to explain what his focus was.

An unrelated hit showed up that had Sarah wanting to go back to San Diego, Heather Chandler, they may have finished things on a better note the last time they saw her, but the fact that she'd been broken out of prison indicated that she had gone across to BGRU, so she was on the other side, and truth be known, Sarah still harboured quite a bit of resentment for all the barbs she'd been throwing at Chuck (and her). So, Sarah really wanted to kick her butt for that, but it was also possible that she could make her see reason/appeal to her better side (such as it was) to turn her and get some useful information out of her about BGRU in exchange for getting her out of the way before the shit hit the fan.

As they refined the search parameters, they were getting more hits, and were steadily building better maps of the probable BGRU people's locations, at this point it appeared that they were primarily gathered in 40-50 locations around the world, with 6-7 of those apparently being major centres. Once they had that to work with, Chuck and Stefan got to work on trying to identify the locations of the offices and where the BGRU people were living if possible. They also concentrated on the identified areas in their search for computer systems and portals, because if they could find those, they could really start to make some headway on this.

Their investigations weren't going anywhere near as quickly as they had on previous operations, the people running BGRU were obviously very good, and were being very careful. Because of that, and the fact that they obviously had their hooks into most of the intelligence community (they couldn't have inserted substitutes and removed the people they wanted from prison without leaving a trace if they didn't pretty much effectively own the organisations running the prisons already), Carmichael Industries and the select group that they could trust enough to work with had to be very careful about who they engaged or shared anything with. To a large degree, their hands were tied, and that was obviously BGRU's plan. Clara's custody hearing had apparently been meant to tie them up for ages with appeals and counter appeals, so as soon as that was concluded (far earlier than their adversaries had wished, they were sure), they'd launched the campaign of separate distracting and delaying tactics in an attempt to keep CI away from any real investigating work. Given the way they appeared to be targeting CI, it looked like they were worried that CI were the ones who would be able to track them down and/or interfere with them, but coming after the Clan didn't make CI think of backing down, it just made them all the more determined to take them down.

Given the fact that BGRU was obviously going to a lot of effort to throw CI off its game, they stopped to discuss the probability of whether Jill had been more than just a head case ex with Chuck's child and and Bryce was more than another head case ex who'd played along because he wanted another shot at Sarah. The way Bryce had been when Chuck and Zondra confronted him, he really hadn't been sufficiently mentally competent to mount the investigation that was needed to track them down. Therefore, now knowing what they'd tried to do with Clara to throw everyone off balance, it was a distinct possibility that the whole thing with Jill and Charlie had been another exercise perpetrated by BGRU to put the CI team off their game. Jill may well have been following the motivations that she told Casey and Carina (they were trained interrogators and she wasn't stupid enough to risk what they would have done to her if they thought she was wasn't telling them the truth), but Bryce wasn't functioning well enough to locate them at that point on his own, so someone else must have supplied the information through him to bring her to them, (and possibly planted the suggestion to go to them for money) it was looking more and more likely that they'd been in BGRU's sights for a while now.

With Mary and Carina in Chicago chasing the Intersect team and Sarah and Alex in San Diego chasing Heather Chandler, Casey was getting nervous about how exposed they were, he knew that Chuck was more than capable when he was on the spot, but he still had moral issues with killing, and Casey himself wasn't 100% since he got shot up the way that he was, that left Zondra as their best resource to protect them. Therefore he arranged for Josie to move into their place as well to boost their security capability (part of the reasoning being to protect Josie as well as protect the others, as she was exposed out there by herself), and quietly arranged though the General to get one of his old teams stationed with them for the duration (after screening all of them carefully, being burned once by someone he'd trusted was enough), they were brought in at night and housed in the bunkers, so hopefully no-one else knew that they were there.

While the others were hunting the BGRU people, the team back at Castle Carmichael kept chasing the on-line records (and looking after the kids). They were progressing at a crawl compared to the way things normally went for the team, but they were making some headway. They were still getting hits on the remainder of the flagged potential BGRU members, and they'd managed to locate some of their facilities so they started collecting all of the utilities records for those properties to map out the probable function and usage of the properties. By this process they managed to locate the first of the BGRU portals. It didn't take long for Chuck and Stefan to get past the controls and copy all the data off the systems inside of that portal, erase any sign of their visit and get out again. Cracking the encryption on the files they extracted was the closest thing to fun that Chuck, Stefan and Ellie had had in the last couple of weeks as the encryption keys were all hidden in logic puzzles, and the Bartowskis LOVED puzzles. Once the encryption on the files was cracked, they settled down to start working through them, and in the space of a few hours they'd gotten further ahead than they had in the month and a half that they'd been chasing this matter.

Sarah and Alex had only been in San Diego three days when they located Heather Chandler, then they settled in to watch her, track her movements and note who she was dealing with. As hoped, they identified at least nine other potential BGRU members from monitoring her meetings, and also determined the location of their office and at least four home addresses (including her's), all of which they relayed back to Castle Carmichael to flesh out the BGRU model that they were building. That intel, though, while important, wasn't the primary reason for watching her, the primary reason was to ascertain how likely they'd be able to turn her, and from the miserable and lonely expression she wore most of the time she was alone, maybe it wouldn't be that hard. They watched her and gathered intel for five days. Sarah had Chuck and the kids missing her (almost as much as she was missing them) and it was hard, because this was the longest that she'd been away from them since she came back after that night at the beach, but she didn't bail on missions before they were finished, so she was going to complete the mission before they went home.

When Heather came "home" that night to her apartment, she immediately knew something was off and went on the defensive, but was strangely relieved when someone turned the lights on and she found herself facing Sarah and another younger woman, both holding pistols on her. The other woman looked confused when she greeted Sarah as "Jenny/Sarah", so she obviously wasn't up on the whole story, maybe that was something she could use. Sarah had her remove her weapons and leave them there before walking to the chair in the middle of the room to sit down, then held her pistol on her as the other woman put her's down and came across (without getting in Sarah's line of fire) to carefully secure Heather to the chair. When Heather tried to distract Sarah by engaging her while Alex was securing her, Sarah just smiled and said "Soon". Once Heather was secure and Alex had returned to her previous position (again without crossing Sarah's line of fire, she was properly trained), Sarah introduced Alex and asked Heather if she remembered Casey, when she nodded she smiled and told her that Alex was his daughter. That made Heather turn to stare at Alex in shock, which in turn prompted Alex to angrily ask why everyone reacted that way when they heard that Casey had a daughter (leaving little doubt that she WAS his daughter by the way she growled the question). Sarah smiled and soothingly told her that her father had spent a LONG time building a reputation that he was an unrelenting machine, pretty much like the terminator (without the accent), so the idea that he had a softer side and had children (especially a pretty daughter), well it was a bit of a shock to most people.

With that Sarah turned back to Heather and decided to get something else out of the way, turning to Alex and communicating what she was doing with a look before she put her weapon down and pulled a picture from her purse, then walked over to Heather (also keeping out of Alex's line of fire). If Alex thought Heather looked shocked when she heard that Casey had a daughter, she re-evaluated what shocked looked like when Sarah showed her the family picture of her and Chuck sitting with their four children, Heather looked up her and blurted out "You're a mother? You have FOUR kids?" Sarah smiled and nodded, saying that it was great, she gave Heather another chance to look at the photo, taking in how happy they all were, before turning to return to her seat across the room. As she put the picture away and picked up her pistol she answered Heather's questions, saying yes she was still with Chuck and things were going great, telling her (after a small delay) about losing her memories and the fact that she had most, but not quite all, of them back now, and the rest of the banter. Heather's eyes held a genuine sadness when she told her about the memories, so it looked like there may be some hope for her. Sarah smiled to herself as she remembered, again, Carina's speech about Chuck being a virus who infected people with his goodness, maybe Heather had been infected enough for this to work.

Sarah started the discussion (it was too cordial to be called an interrogation) about the new organisation that Heather was involved in. Neither of them was new in the game, so they didn't waste time on threats, promises or evasions, Sarah just offered to do the best she could for Heather if she gave them real information that was of use to them, and Heather accepted that and answered her questions honestly. She didn't know who was at the top of the organisation (which didn't have a name, so Sarah smiled and said that they'd have to keep calling it Bad Guys R Us, Heather grinned and asked who came up with that, saying "Figures" when Sarah responded with "Chuck, of course"), but it was filled with the old CIA and other agency heavy hitters, many of whom had been released from prison or were supposedly killed to get them off the radar, but quite a few were still holding their positions in the agencies. She provided some names that they hadn't known about, and confirmed many that they'd flagged as probables for the organisation. She also told her that they'd absorbed a lot of Volkoff Industries when they were shut down and broken up (something that they hadn't known).

When Heather proved to her that she was co-operating, Sarah got Alex to release her, but they still sat out of reach with their weapons as they talked. Heather also provided a viable exit strategy, as there was still a lot of bad blood with the old Volkoff crew, so they'd already tried to kill her a few times. Therefore, they obtained a suitable corpse, staged a car bombing that would eliminate most of the DNA evidence, and salted pieces "thrown" from the blast with enough of her blood etc to convince most that it had been her who was in the car when it blew. With that, they headed back to L.A. in Sarah's Odyssey, Heather baulked when she saw it, telling her that she never thought she'd sell out THAT much, but Sarah just smiled mysteriously and said "Not everything is as it seems". As they drove, Alex pulled up a picture of Sarah's Shooting Brake on her phone and showed it to Heather, telling her that this was Sarah's other car, which got the response of "Now that's a real car!" Sarah smiled at that and checked around for any sign of cops as they got off the freeway, asking whether everyone was strapped in before flooring it. After seeing the way that the "minivan" handled the winding roads at well over 150 MPH, Heather conceded that maybe it wasn't an embarrassing soccer mom machine, after all, which just got a grin from Sarah.

They got in that night, parking next to the "HIS" Odyssey in the garage (Heather just looked from one to the other, asking "Really?", getting another grin in response), and put Heather in one of the holding cells in the bunkers, the team leader down there told them that she'd be well looked after, when Sarah looked at him, he assured her that Heather would be properly and well treated, which got a nod from her before she left. After a proper catch up with Chuck and the kids, She filled Chuck and Casey in on what she'd gotten from Heather so far, and they updated the BGRU models with that. Chuck also brought them up to date on how things were going in Chicago, they hadn't had much luck as yet, but Laszlo had also shown up, so they had a working team there to look into Intersect issues, and they'd narrowed down their location a smaller area of the city, at least.

The search engines kept getting more hits, when they saw him, Chuck, Sarah and Casey all immediately recognised Mr Colt in the image that popped up on the screen, a man that large was rather hard to miss. He appeared to be part of a protective detail, so when Chuck determined the subject of the detail he went to the keyboard to zoom in on him, thinking that the man was big himself, given that he wasn't dwarfed by Mr Colt. Chuck looked back to the screen as it zoomed in on the man in question but when they saw his face they all froze, he was supposed to be dead! Chuck mechanically went to the keyboard to type in instructions to send one of the SonicStars to D.C. for a pick up ASAP, and initiated a video link with General Beckman. The General looked up and started to ask what was so important, but Chuck cut her off to tell her to get to the airport, they were sending SonicStar for her and they needed her down here straight away. She just looked at him, stunned, and took in the looks on all their faces, asking "I'm not going to like this, am I?" Chuck just said "No" and terminated the link. She sat there, staring at the blank screen, knowing that this had to be beyond bad, she had never seen Chuck Bartowski behave like that, and his wife and John Casey were two of the most accomplished and courageous agents she'd ever known (or heard of for that matter), so for them to be standing there, openly shocked and afraid, well she didn't know what to think. With that, she picked up the phone to call for her protective detail to get her to the private area of the airport ASAP.


	7. Puppet Master 3

**Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters, yada, yada.**

As soon as Carmichael Industries' uprated S-97 helicopter touched down in the middle of the common area of Castle Carmichael, the General hopped out and stomped across to Chuck and Sarah's house, Casey watched her as she came and turned his head to tell them "She'd pissed", Chuck just shrugged and said that she was going to be a lot more pissed pretty soon. Sarah greeted her at the door and asked if she wanted to see Josie before they got down to business, but she gruffly answered that if she was being summoned here the way she was, there must be something urgent to attend to? At that Chuck nodded and led the way to the office.

Once they were in the office, Casey shut the door behind them and Chuck activated the communications jammers and white noise generators before he brought up the images that they'd dredged up in the time since they found that first one on the screens around the office. She kept turning to look at all the screens with her mouth open for a couple of minutes before she could speak, and when she did the first words that came out of her mouth were "How is this possible? I watched him being blown up in that explosion!" With that Casey brought a chair to her and basically pulled her into it, as she kept looking at the images that were being displayed. They gave her a few minutes to compose herself before the discussion began.

Chuck started by apologising for the abrupt way he'd summoned her down here, but said that he expected that she understood now why they insisted that she had to come down straight away, and why they couldn't discuss anything over communications links? She nodded grimly, still trying to get her head around all this. Sarah stepped in to explain that no-one else knew about this yet, the three of them had been in the room when the first image showed up and they'd called her straight away, then kicked off the searches to find anything else that may be out there (waving her hand around at the screens). Chuck tagged in again to ask whether she could get them a copy of the raw video that she'd watched of the explosion so that they could analyse it, and whether there was any DNA confirmation that the correct person's remains had been buried? She said that if they sent someone they trusted back with her, she'd hand deliver the video to them and get them safely escorted back to the plane to bring it back here. On the remains, no, they hadn't managed to get any close matches to his DNA after the explosion, but had put it down to the fact that he was the closest one to the device when it blew, which was probably lucky given that someone blew up the man's remains recently, which would have made it even harder to get a match, looking at Chuck. She then asked if there was any real proof that this was Graham? Chuck shook his head, but pointed out that the image recognition systems were consistently getting at least 90-95% match to Graham on nearly all images, which was a very high rate, also, it made sense, whoever was pulling the strings on this was a master of the game and obviously knew all the players and all the tricks, there couldn't be many people at that level and Langston Graham had been one of that select few.

She was quiet for a few minutes more, and then asked how he could have done this? Sarah answered that one, as it was closer to her con background than the spy background that they all shared. In a way it was a kind of slight of hand trick, it looked like Graham had employed a very good double/impersonator and sent him into the Intersect room to die in his place, changing the biometric information in the system to match the double's, so the system recognised him as Graham. Graham would have stayed away from the CIA facilities altogether that day (if not longer) so there were no gaps in his replacement's movements, and everyone would have just taken the replacement as him. She also pointed out that Graham wasn't really close to anyone, he kept everyone subservient and just gave orders, so there wouldn't have been anyone in a position to pick up on any subtle nuance flaws in the replacement, all he'd have to do was give out orders and dismiss people once he'd given them their orders and that would be accepted as normal behaviour. At that point she stopped and looked up at the others, saying that that was the way the prisoner substitutions would have been done, too, they'd update the details in the system, the guards would bring the substitutes in under some pretence, they'd swap clothes etc and the real prisoner would walk away, free and clear. She also went into the more effective methods of faking a death (just as they'd done for Heather) which could explain the majority of the "dead" agents that were popping up in this new organisation away.

On the topic of "dead" agents, Chuck then went over his theories about the Ring's process to revive people. Chuck pointed out the dangers he perceived in this process, detailing the behaviour and personality changes that they'd seen in both Bryce and Shaw, and especially what Bryce was like after he'd been through the process twice. The Ring obviously didn't care if the people they brought back were killing, torturing or raping indiscriminately, all they cared about was the results that they got out of them. He showed them the records he'd found of what Bryce was like when he went back to the Ring the second time he was brought back, and even Casey blanched at the reports of what Bryce had been doing. With that information, Chuck proposed that they make an effort to identify anyone who'd been brought back and determine what the nature of their behaviour was, they were all dangerous, but ones who had gone totally over the edge like Bryce needed to be dealt with. On that note he brought up Shaw, he had to be expected to turn up at the Chicago Intersect project, and Mary and Carina were up there, exposed. Yes, it was possible to defeat him with a bit of help (as he'd found), but he was unstable, amoral and very dangerous, so he was worried about them. The General and Casey committed to organising for a trusted team to be put in position there to support Mary and Carina.

With Chuck and Sarah's tag team explanation, it was becoming clear to the General that what they were telling her was both plausible and possible, and she could see how this could have panned out, but they still didn't know what they were up against. With the big issue out of the way, they ran her through everything they had to date, and it was all bad news, she'd gone from aggravated to shocked to terrified in a very short time, what they had so far told the story that they were up against the worst adversary that they'd ever faced, and they still didn't know the scope of that adversary. What was worse was that they had no idea who they could trust, they were prepared to trust the President, himself, and perhaps a dozen other individuals who weren't part of their circle, but outside of that, they had no confidence in anyone. They brought Heather in to fill the General in on what she knew, and give her an insider's view of how the new organisation worked, after she was taken back downstairs the General said that she presumed that Ms Chandler would be returned to custody once she'd been properly debriefed, and she was surprised (to say the least) by the abrupt "No!" she got from Sarah. Once Sarah had her attention she explained that they already had ample proof that the "good guys" no longer controlled the prison facilities, or the agencies that ran them apparently, so sending Heather back in there would probably be a death sentence, or worse. Therefore, she would remain in the bunkers here except when let out under escort until they had resolved this issue, and then we (waving a finger between Chuck, Casey and herself) would decide what to do with her, adding that General, personally would be consulted for her opinion, but outside organisations would NOT be read into it at all (this last stated while locking gaze with the General to demand a response). The General sighed and nodded, agreeing that the old rules didn't apply any more, and that they couldn't trust anyone else.

With that they put together everything they had on the organisation (including the images and footage of the person that they were sure was Graham, and the Puppet Master behind the organisation as well as the updates of what they'd just covered off with the General) onto a thumb drive for the General while she spent some time with Josie. Given that their world was falling down around them and they were facing a conspiracy, the likes of which they'd never seen before, she needed to be with her daughter for a while. They understood what she was going through, so it was Josie who went back with her to get the raw footage of the Intersect room explosion when the General left to fly back to D.C. Once Josie had the footage and had been safely escorted by the General's protection detail back to the SonicStar for the flight home, the General had a private meeting with the President to fill him in on the new developments, she was expecting that his reaction would be the same as her's when she showed him the evidence of Langston Graham's "return from the dead", and the scope of the organisation as they knew it now, and she was correct. It was disconcerting to see "The leader of the free world" so effectively floored by what she put in front of him, but in a way it gave her confidence that they were correct to have put their trust in him.

Back at the ranch, in view of the decision that Sarah had just made in front of the General, Sarah and Casey organised for Heather's quarters to be made more comfortable, she was still in the same room (cell) with bathroom that she was before, but they brought in what she wanted to make it more "homey" for her, permanently set the door transparency to zero and set the door lock mechanisms to be under Heather's control only (well they had override capabilities if necessary), so that she was more a resident of the bunker, than a prisoner, and had pretty much free reign down there. She understood that she'd be kept there for the long term, but also understood that a significant factor in that was to keep her safe from BGRU and those associated with it, so she made sure that Sarah knew that she appreciated what she was doing.

When Josie got back with the video, they enhanced and reviewed every frame obsessively, but they were neither surprised nor relieved when the image recognition tests and examination of the movements and behaviour both showed a rather low probability that the man they were watching was Langston Graham. They fully expected that that would be the case, but were hoping against hope that they'd be proven wrong, because in this instance being right was the most frightening outcome they could think of.

Now that they had an idea of what (or rather, who) they were up against, they had a new focus for their searches, they were still running the rest of the searches to scope out and locate the BGRU forces, but now their prime focus was on the Puppet Master himself. They started back tracing every sighting they had of Graham, in an attempt to narrow down his movements, and ultimately his location. The did have one major win in that he appeared to stay in the USA most of the time, circulating around the BGRU locations that they'd flagged, and the most common place for him to be sighted was in Chicago. The fact that their Intersect project was also in Chicago was unlikely to be a co-incidence, as he was probably banking on that to give them the push that they needed to establish a foothold.

They contacted Mary and Carina daily to get their updates and fill them in what they'd dredged up, the news from Mary that Shaw had been sighted there as well filled them with dread, as the three of them knew first hand how dangerous he was, but Mary and Carina hadn't experienced that as yet, so their confidence that they could handle themselves didn't make the others feel any better. The news that they gave them that the Puppet Master may be there as well (they never mentioned Graham's name, in case their communications were compromised or they were taken) just added to the risk they were in. Carina's emotional state was also a worry, she took every chance to talk to Charlie, because they missed each other so much, but it tore her up to see him so unhappy that she was away from him. Eventually Chuck and Sarah talked to Zondra and with her agreement, arbitrarily swapped her for Carina in Chicago, now that Shaw and Graham were probably there, the risk that Carina could be recognised as a result of her associations with Team Bartowski was too great, and she wasn't really on her game as being a mother was interfering with her being an operative. When Carina got back they had the expected heated argument over what they'd done, but after it had run on for a while Chuck brought up images of Charlie on the screens around the room and asked wasn't he more important than being in the field? At that Carina broke down and Sarah went to hold her as she told her that she and Chuck had had to make the same call about their involvement in operations, as what they had at home was more important than the fate of the world, when it came down to it.

In the meantime the more general investigations into BGRU had had a few big wins, they'd tracked down a number of the locations, including four of the major centres, with the locations identified they went through the same process to analyse the utility records again and managed to identity portals for three of the centres, plus the Chicago location. With that information they mounted the same operation they did for the first portal they'd found, disabling the controls, copying everything they could find inside the portal, and removing any trace of their visit before putting the controls back in place. Luckily the government/spy mindset didn't focus in the same areas as their's did, and their technical expertise was rather down, compared to the Bartowskis. Even Laszlo, the evil technical genius, was more of an inventor than hacker, so he wasn't anywhere near Chuck's (or rather The Piranha's) level in that field, and Manoosh was way below Laszlo, so their incursion went pretty much unnoticed.

Having copies of the files was a good step, but they still had to decrypt everything, and that was taking time. Not surprisingly, the encryption utilised at the first site that they'd cracked was simpler than what was being used at the major centres, or their top secret Chicago site, so getting into the files was talking a LOT longer than Chuck liked, but he and his father kept slogging away at it, because they had to get into those files.


	8. Puppet Master 4

**Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're NOT out to get you.**

**Usual disclaimer for the land of Litigation, no rights to any characters...**

Chuck and Stefan spent the next two weeks working flat out to get through the umpteen layers of encryption on the files that they'd pilfered from the BGRU sites. As soon as they had them in a usable state they passed them onto the others for analysis. While they were excited about cracking the files, seeing what they were getting out of them was making their world get darker by the day (by the hour in some cases), they were getting a wealth of information about BGRU, and it was far worse than they'd ever imagined, or feared. The Puppet Master had connections at all levels throughout the world's governments, and he appeared to be in a position to take control of a significant proportion of them when he made his move, he'd obviously been planning this up for decades, probably most of his adult life as many of them appeared to go back 30-40 years. On top of that, the names of the people in the organisation that they extracted from the records were the worst adversaries they'd ever come up against, including the previous Ring director, Shaw of course, and a host of others.

One thing that they did confirm from the files was that the Puppet Master was based in the same facility as the Intersect project (which made sense, as they expected that having access to the Intersect databases was what he was waiting on to make his move), so they pulled Mary and Zondra out of Chicago and brought them home. It was just too dangerous for them to be in Chicago when Graham and others who could identify them were there. They left the strike team that Casey and the General had arranged to support Mary and Carina in place, so that they'd have resources available if and when they were in a position to take the facility. Mary and Zondra were the last to find out about Langston Graham, as there here had been no way of securing the communications enough, and if the had worst happened and they'd been taken, the fact that they'd ascertained his identity didn't get out. They were as shocked as anyone was when they were told, but could understand why they hadn't been told before that.

Chuck was making daily trips to DC in the MiniStar (they'd acquired the ¼ scale single seat flight prototype of the SonicStar by virtue of basically buying the company, and luckily the smaller plane could operate out of a small local airstrip) to hand deliver each day's findings to the General (and, in some instances, the President). The General and the President were organising with a dozen trusted allies around the world (most of whom were also heads of state) to monitor and arrange to take down the key BGRU points of presence, so Chuck was delivering the intel to them so that they could pass the relevant sections on to the people it impacted the most.

As well as analysing the files they extracted, they were still searching the net for any other information or indicators about BGRU. It was no faster than it had been earlier (the Puppet Master controlled his people well), but they were managing to accumulate a little more each day. By now they had a relatively comprehensive map of who was located in which BGRU facility, and who the key members that they HAD to get when they took them, so all the key BGRU people were subjects of individual searches, to flag every sighting and mention of them. After a bit over four months, Clan Carmichael, the General and the President's team agreed that they had nearly all the information that they could get without making a move on BGRU, that they had all the key BGRU people targeted and tracked, and that they had trusted teams available to take any key BGRU facilities and associates. Chuck and Sarah (and the others) didn't want to go back into the field but agreed that this was too critical, they just couldn't sit this one out, so Clan Carmichael was going to be taking a significant role in the raid on the Chicago Intersect facility take out their Intersect project, and the Puppet Master. What no-one outside the family knew was that there was an ultra secure safe room buried well below the bunkers under Castle Carmichael, so Ellie, Clara, Kathleen, Stefan, Jeff, Charlie, Emma, Molly, Yvonne, Zack, Jaqueline and Piotr were all safely ensconced in there while everyone else (even Heather) took part in the raid on the Intersect facility. Stefan and Jeff would be providing technical support from the safe room, but all of the family's non-combatants were safely locked away in there. The safe room was designed to handle a direct hit from a reasonable sized nuclear bomb, so they would be safe in there.

When they were gearing up for the assault on the Intersect facility, they decided to share the Thumpers etc with the team that they'd be taking from Castle Carmichael, needless to say their eyes lit up (they were candy to guys like that), but they were going to need every bit of help they could get if they wanted to get through this alive. While none of them discussed it, they didn't really expect all of them to live through it, so they looked around their family with sad eyes, wondering who would come out the other side of this. Of course, Carina and Zondra being who they were, they both turned to Sarah to say "Fuck it, there's a chance that we may never have another shot at this", and walked up to Chuck to drag him into mad, passionate kisses that were just short of sex, thanking the stunned Chuck afterwards and telling Sarah that they could see what she saw in him now, it was the only lightening of the mood that they got as Casey and Heather pissed themselves laughing, Mary and Alex grinned and Sarah smiled as she went to comfort Chuck after he was "assaulted".

They were in contact with Stefan and Jeff all the way to Chicago and they blasted straight into the facility when they got there, the other strike team were nearby, waiting, and they breached at the same time. The teams split up, some taking out the communications facilities, some taking the security facilities, some focusing on the Intersect project and Chuck and Sarah's team heading for the Puppet Master. Mary was the only family member that went with Chuck and Sarah, Casey took Alex and Carina with him to take the Intersect project and Zondra, Josie and Heather were on the other teams. As expected, Graham had kept the cream of the security for himself, so they had to go through Mr Colt and Hugo Panzer and their teams to get to him, but given the magnitude of what they were facing, Chuck had given up on non-lethal solutions this time, his main priority was for his family to survive this, and that meant he had to deal with Graham and the BGRU on their terms. Colt, Panzer and the rest in the way of getting to Graham were taken out in a hail of inhumanly fast and accurate shots, and when they found that the door to Graham's office was pretty much a vault door, Chuck called everyone back, pulled the Thumper from where it was slung across his back and blew it in. Chuck and Sarah were the first through the door, taking out all the security people he had in the room (except for the ones who had been obliterated by the door when it blew in), and tranqued Graham before he could react.

Once that was done, they had the team remove all the bodies and vacate the room while they secured Graham to a chair in the middle of the room and waited for him to regain consciousness. When Graham came to, he looked around at Chuck, Sarah and Mary, and smirked, thinking that he knew how this would go, given Chuck's moral position on death and torture. He was therefore rather surprised when Sarah stepped up to him, drove a spike into his shoulder and asked whether she had his attention, while Chuck looked on without turning a hair. He looked at her in shock without saying a word, so she did it again, and that time he frantically pleaded with her to stop. Now that they'd set the tone for the interrogation, Mary turned to guard the door while Sarah began getting information out of Graham, the strike teams hadn't let them down yet but they couldn't really trust anyone outside of the family at that point.

In the space of the next couple of hours, Sarah extracted the plan that Graham had been working on for the past 40 odd years, and Graham progressively lost fingers and accumulated other injuries. At point he asked Chuck how he could be letting this happen, and Chuck looked him in the eye and said that sometimes, evil must be met with evil for the greater good, before turning away. Sarah leaned in and quietly asked Graham if he remembered all the things he'd put her through and made her do for the greater good?

Apparently Graham had always been ambitious (well, a megalomaniac, actually), from the time that he joined the agency, he'd been scheming to get to "his rightful position". He'd killed or otherwise removed anyone in his way, and the way he gloated about how he'd framed, blackmailed or otherwise destroyed the various unfortunate individuals (and their families) that he considered an impediment to what was his rightful due as he chronicled his rise to power made his listeners start thinking that the ones who were killed outright may have been the lucky ones (even Mary looked a trifle green, and she'd been the right hand of one of the world's biggest psychopaths for over 20 years until that persona was suppressed and Hartley was released to take over again). Even though two of the three listeners effectively had eidetic memories, they recorded the interrogation as they would not be releasing this monster afterwards.

Graham was quite prepared, if not proud, to describe how his plans had developed over the past 40 years, and what he'd done to bring them to fruition, the sneer as he looked at the three of them occasionally made them wonder what he was up to, but they presumed (correctly) that it would come out. If Graham was to be believed, he'd been instrumental in pushing the CIA's Intersect project forward, and at the very least he knew all the details, right back to the start, even down to the fact that a certain promising young agent was assigned to protect and manage Stephen Bartowski when he was engaged to work on the project (Chuck caught his mother's eye and asked a question with a look, not missing her look of concern as she nodded infinitesimally, Sarah shared a concerned look of her own with him over that response). Graham talked about the testing programs that were rolled out in universities and high schools to determine the best potential Intersect hosts (Chuck turned to quickly stare at him with that, as they'd never heard of testing being done anywhere else but at universities), and how anyone with promisingly high results was flagged and monitored (Sarah was looking away at that point, but Chuck noted with dread the brief look that Graham cast at her when he said that). Given that Graham had no loyalty to anyone but himself, he made no bones about naming the multitudes of lost souls (and just plain monsters) that he'd recruited and turned over the past 40 odd years to do his bidding, and quite a few of those names were at this time people of considerable power and influence, when those houses were cleaned, there would be considerable upheaval around the world in the seats of power. He had spent over 40 years, quite literally planning to seize world dominance, and the scariest part of that was that this time, he would have had a good chance of doing so if they hadn't stopped him.

He finally got up to the point about 5-6 years before when Chuck was supposed to be "replaced" by the new Intersect. Since Bryce sent the Intersect to Chuck (under orders from him), his plans had received a few setbacks, he was supposed to get total control of the Intersect project so he could progress things in the best direction (both Chuck and Sarah looked at him when he said that, uneasy about his tone), but some political hacks had convinced the powers that be that it needed to be a joint CIA/NSA project with both sides keeping an eye on each other, so that bitch Beckman became the major thorn in his side, always getting in the way, questioning or interfering with his directives or reporting what he was doing, and the people backing her had considerable political power, so the only way to bring his plans to fruition was to disappear. He boastfully detailed the process he'd followed and Sarah had been exactly right, except that she'd missed the fact the he also engineered the explosion to take out all of the CIA's Intersect prospects and infrastructure, effectively hamstringing the CIA's Intersect aspirations, and leaving Chuck as the only Intersect resource in existence. The best part was that all it took was a two bit actor that as close to his height, build and appearance (plastic surgery made appearance good enough to fool just about anyone, and he had been cultivating the abrupt, authoritarian personality for decades to keep people at a distance, ensuring that they didn't look him in the eye or attempt to engage him in any way).

Sarah asked why he'd risk getting Chuck terminated if the plan was to ensure that Chuck was indispensable, and he spat back that Beckman had given the order to her robot too early, and almost got him killed, the order wasn't supposed to be given until after the new Intersect was operational, and of course then it would have been cancelled before anyone was dispatched to carry it out. Chuck was supposed to be put on hold and under protection until the other plans for him panned out, but of course Beckman and her robot screwed all that up, too. Sarah asked what the other plans were but he clammed up, until he lost another finger joint to get him talking.

Graham glared at her with a look of utter hatred, then sneered as he told her that she was meant to get attached to Chuck and manage him the way that Frost was induced to manage his father. Both Sarah and Mary stared at Graham in shock, while Chuck began to succumb to a rare fit of rage as he heard that two of the three most important women in his life, his wife and his birth mother (Ellie was more of an actual mother) had been groomed and conditioned to be, basically, concubines to himself and his father by the CIA. He started to advance on Graham but Sarah recovered quickly enough to stop him, telling him quietly that she needed to get this information out of Graham while they had a chance, looking into his eyes from less than a foot away until she saw the rage recede and sanity return. She kissed him and asked if he was OK as she held her palm to his chest. He nodded shakily and she kissed him again before turning back to Graham.

It took a bit more inducement to get Graham to pick up the story again as he thought he'd won that point, but Sarah got him talking again. When he said that that much of her training and conditioning had been to groom her for her role with Bartowski, it was Sarah that had to be held back, as she said that she was doing her job, but she fell in love with Chuck. Graham sneered at that, gloating that she, or more to the point she and Bartowski, had been following the scripts that were laid out for them for the last 15 years, turning his head to Mary to add that SHE had been following her scripts for 35 years now. Turning back to Sarah he gave her a malicious smirk as he told her she'd been selected as a result of the tests that they slipped into the high school aptitude testing process, and when they'd discovered her father's occupation it was easy to set it up for him to be arrested so that he had a hook to get her under his control.

Her appearance was a disaster then, but at least she had the basics that they could mould into something that they could work with. Then they had to train her from scratch to know how to behave in the right circumstances, and THAT took a lot of work, he added with a oily smirk (Chuck took a step forward again, but his mother took his arm and he managed to get himself under control). Graham conceded that Sarah had surprised them with her physical, martial arts and firearms capabilities, they never expected that someone like her, who was primarily selected for her intellect and the mental capabilities that she was tested for would be much good for anything else, so that was a bonus, they weren't too surprised by her ability to soak up languages or pretty much anything else, as that WAS part of what she was selected for. Once she was trained properly in ALL areas (this added with another oily smirk), her conditioning process was started to ensure that she'd do whatever she was told to do, and she was put into circumstances where only his intervention could save her, so she'd be suitably grateful and obedient. They ran through that process for 5-6 years to make sure she would do what she was supposed to. The later phases were primarily to build links that they planned to use down the track, like Larkin, though he hadn't minded playing with her after they'd managed to mould her into a worthwhile sex toy with all their efforts. The Budapest situation almost went astray though, she was supposed to get in trouble and be rescued (and therefore suitably grateful), but Reiker had gotten greedy and thought he could get a good pay day out of it, if that had ruined all his work Reiker would have taken a long time to die, but as she'd came out that in a good state of mind to be set up with Bartowski, he'd let Reiker live, and ordered Larkin to initiate the Intersect transfer to Bartowski and start the next act of the show.

At this point he turned his head to sneer at Chuck, saying that he'd been a lot easier to mould into what they wanted, what he was bred for. All three heads came up to stare at him with murder in their eyes, so he focused on Mary, saying that for someone with an IQ like her's, she was clueless, she'd done everything that she'd been told to (aside from actually falling love with Stephen Bartowski), she delivered the first generation of the super spy breeding program and then went off to babysit Volkoff for 20 years when poor Hartley's persona encoding went wrong. Roarke had screwed up the changes he was supposed to make to the Volkoff encoding, but that was OK, even with his screw up the end affect was what they wanted, to keep her out of the way. Her laughed, saying that she'd been so eager to please when she was selected for the plum assignment of looking after their technical wizard, Stephen Bartowski, believing that she was selected because of her performance and dedication to duty. He conceded that her performance was right up there, far and away better than any other female agent in her day, but she was primarily selected because of her intelligence and physical capabilities, and the fact that she was fairly attractive and the right type to appeal to Bartowski (adding "senior" as he looked at Chuck) helped as well. He did say that the fact that they (laughing) fell in love probably helped with the prime aim, which was to breed superior spies, to try and meld Bartowski's brain with a woman who was almost as intelligent and who had the physical capabilities to counter his amazing lack of them. They let her off the hook and chose not to punish her, but rather let her have the babies when it was found that she'd gotten pregnant. Of course, they couldn't have her there playing Mommy as that would have gotten in the way of the children being moulded into what they wanted them to be, so they manufactured the scenario where they needed to insert an artificial weapons dealer into the European arena. It wasn't too hard to convince Bartowski to create a mechanism to temporarily to implant an artificial personality into a subject, and as Hartley Winterbottom trusted that it would be safe as long as as his friend did it, he volunteered to be the subject. It was easy to get Roarke to make the requested changes to the program, if he baulked at the money offered they would have sent the pictures to the mob boss of Roarke and his under-aged daughter. Of course Roarke screwed up the job he was given, but the end result was the same, "Volkoff" was there to stay, and Frost went in to keep an eye on him until Bartowski could find a way to fix the problem. Once she was over there, it was a simple matter to leak enough details about her to "Volkoff" to make her do a deal to stay there, in hope that her family wasn't discovered.

Bartowski senior was a problem though, he ended up falling apart because he was lovesick (Graham looked over at Chuck with disdain as he said it was obviously a family trait) and disappeared as well a few years later, that fitted into the breeding scheme, but hampered the Intersect project, as Perseus and Roarke weren't good enough to finish the development without him. The CIA and NSA were throwing all the resources it could into tracking him down, but the reason that they wanted his genes (that incredible brain) worked against them here, as he was always several steps ahead of them. In the meantime, however, they inserted people into the younger Bartowskis' lives to keep pushing them in the right direction. The girl wasn't malleable enough to keep her heading in the desired direction, she went into medicine and it was pretty obvious that they wouldn't be able to get her down the agent path, pity, she had the intellect and physical capabilities, at least she was still viable as breeding material.

Once he'd got the boy into Stanford with the right scholarship, he'd used suitable recruits via the CIA and Fulcrum to keep him in line and push him in the required direction, Larkin was set up as his room mate to always keep him in sight and keep him away from anything that may help him see behind the curtains. When they re-tested him at Stanford, he was almost off the charts in most areas, above his father and with vast amounts of retention capability. He didn't go down the athletic path, but they saw enough signs to know that he did have the requisite physical capabilities, if largely latent at that point. Roberts was set up as his girlfriend to keep him from making any solid associations with other women, they had considered her as a possible breeding partner, but while she had a good intellect and impressive physical capabilities, she wasn't good enough to match up to Bartowski's potential, so they continued to with the plan to groom Walker for that role, another benefit with Walker was that she was almost up to Bartowski's retention levels (96% against 98%), so their progeny should have higher capabilities than either of them. (Sarah and Chuck looked at each other with that statement, and Chuck said that they were told that Bryce had had the next highest score. Graham snorted, saying that they'd suppressed her scores so she wouldn't attract attention and boosted Larkin's so he would look like a more viable candidate.)

Graham looked around the room, he knew he wasn't likely to get out of there, but he reasoned that at least he'd get the story about his brilliant plans and how he'd managed to make most of them come to fruition out to the world, or at least the intelligence community, that could be his legacy. And besides, this way he could torture and hopefully destroy these people who had interfered with his plans.

After the interruption Graham continued, telling how Larkin had set Bartowski up to get him kicked out and left his scripted speech about saving him where it could be found in the future. Roberts was instructed to sleep with Larkin, get caught and "break up" with Bartowski. That wasn't a hard sell for either Larkin or Roberts as they'd both screw anything that would stay still long enough. So they extracted Bartowski from his safe environment and got him out of the CIA's sight, so they could mould him properly. The problem was that he was such a pathetic sop that he fell apart because his "girlfriend" screwed around and left him. So they spent the next few years monitoring him and giving him the occasional nudge to try to get him headed in the right direction, while they groomed Walker to be the perfect rescue from that life (Sarah desperately wanted to rip the tongue out of Grahams' mouth at this point, but they needed to know what he'd set in play, all the more so now that he'd set them up as a super agent breeding plan, so she said and did nothing, but buried her face in Chuck's chest when he put his arm around her, they were standing behind Graham and out of his line of sight unless he turned his head completely around, so he was just staring at Mary and goading her as he talked).

After the Budapest incident, Walker was primed to engage so he ordered Larkin to "steal" the Intersect and blow up the facility, then send the Intersect files to Bartowski to get them loaded into him. Casey getting there in time to shoot Larkin was a hitch in the process, as they needed him for some elements down the track, so he had the body recovered ASAP and had the Ring revival process commenced at the earliest opportunity. He was aware that Larkin probably wouldn't be 100%, but all he needed was for him to play the role a few times, and luckily he'd always been shallow and vapid, so with any luck he'd be good enough to pull it off. He laughed when he referred to Walker's "pathetic attempt to redeem herself" after the previous failures, but Bartowski was hooked straight away and things were looking like they were on track until those stupid politicians saddled him with the bitch and her robot.

Once the setup was in place, another hitch appeared when she fell for Bartowski, to prevent Beckman getting enough evidence to remove her he tried sending a few distractions her way (which showed that he was right, of course, to push the issue to have Larkin revived), and even then Beckman almost managed to get rid of her with the 49B, but Beckman's political connections would have held up his plans way too long, so he arranged to "die" so he could have a free hand to run with them. Of course, the fact that Bartowski loaded the Intersect 2.0 was a surprise, he'd underestimated the lovesick puppy dog, just like he did his father, which meant that a lot of the plans had to be modified, but the pay-off was the fact that Bartowski senior was back now, and they could get the Intersect project back on track. To keep his options open, he had Larkin revived again, but it was obvious that this time he couldn't pull off the act of being "Bryce" any more, but there were some benefits in having a rabid dog prowling around frightening people, it distracted them and made it easier to get things done when you didn't want others noticing.

Without any direct control of the situation, the plans around Walker and Bartowski started to bog down so he'd set up impeccable credentials for Daniel Shaw and arranged for him to be sent in to control the team. The fact that he'd had Shaw's wife killed to keep him under control years ago (not noticing the looks of disgust he was getting when he mused that he may not have done that if she was better in bed) backfired on him as he was unhinged, and when he saw that Walker was falling apart about the situation with Bartowski, he played her insecurities to get her into bed, which was really screwing up the plans. He had been amused when their acting on their feelings for each other were what it took to get his plans back on track, but never let it be said that he'd look a gift horse in the mouth, and it saved him the effort of having to kill Shaw for interfering with his plans, but like Larkin, the long view said that Shaw may be needed so be had his body recovered from the river and revived, once it was found.

So with the breeding pair heading in the right direction, he'd been working on his organisations and associations, he'd basically been pushing Fulcrum and the Ring in the direction he wanted for years, and using them to get things done, but Walker and Bartowski (and the robot, he grudgingly admitted) made a surprisingly effective team once Bartowski started realising his potential in an attempt to impress Walker. They took down Fulcrum, the Ring and Volkoff Industries so fast that he'd hardly had time to extract the key resources and people he needed, and in some instances he didn't have enough time. He poured his resources into the "new" Ring and started moving on his overall plans, but then the old team were back and taking down his new organisation. This time he lost most of his resources, and had to call in just about every favour to get re-started. The good thing was that, though he may have very few resources to kick-start his organisation, he did have dirt on a plethora of people who couldn't afford for him to talk, so money, equipment and facilities flowed his way, and he set up the substitution process to get the ex Ring, Fulcrum and just plain dirty agents, and the other manpower and skillsets they needed.

He'd kept an eye on Larkin in case he needed him, and was rather surprised when Roberts ran into him at the organisation where he worked (as she was working as an escort there). Graham had ordered Larkin to engage Roberts in case she could be useful, so when Larkin took her back to her place to screw her and reported that she had a son and that the father was Bartowski, Graham realised that Roberts could most definitely be useful. After a few hour's coaching Larkin appeared to be just "normal" enough to pitch the scam to Roberts that she deserved better than having to sleep with half a dozen marks a day to be able to support herself and the boy. Anyway, it worked and Roberts went in to her her "share" of the money. Of course she was captured immediately and sent back to the supermax, but within a week she was dead in a "fight" with another prisoner, and her son had a new "Mommy" who was part of the Carmichael operation.

As he'd finished his story, he craned around to look at Sarah, asking how she'd done it? She sighed and schooled her expression before turning to face him and asked "Did what?" When he said, tracked them down, organised the take down and executed it without him suspecting a thing, she smiled up at Chuck as she said "Ask my husband, that was his doing." Graham looked at her in disbelief and then shrugged (as well as he could while tied hand and foot to the chair), saying that at least he'd had the last laugh, because by now the person that he'd planted in their little organisation would have taken their children away to prepare them to embrace their destiny. He'd been right about the breeding prospects of Roberts and her, the child that Roberts had produced was exceptional, but he wasn't even close to the ones that she'd produced for them. The second generation of his breeding program had indeed produced the super spies he wanted. Chuck surreptitiously pulled out his phone, unlocked it and brought up the video feed from the safe room, and the kids were all there with the family, fine, he showed Sarah the video to prove that they were safe just before Graham sealed his fate, saying that his main regret was that he wouldn't have the chance to train her daughters, as he'd promised himself that he'd do that personally this time. Sarah's face instantly froze into a mask of homicidal rage as she spun with a snarl, pulling a pair of pistols and emptying them into his body, shredding it. When both weapons were empty she kept them trained on him, and kept pulling the triggers until Chuck gently took them off her and pulled her into his arms. She jerked when he emptied the tub mag left on one pistol into Graham's head, so that there wasn't much left of it. She looked up at him with a question and he grimly whispered the he was making sure that THAT evil could never come back. Sarah nodded without a word as she she held onto him as if her life depended on it.

Chuck looked at his mother and she nodded, stepping out to call Stefan and ensure that they didn't open the safe room until the family was back, organised someone to pick up Bella, checked on the rest of the family, finding with relief that they all came through with no more than minor flesh wounds, and calling the General to report the outcome of the operation (after telling her that Josie was fine).


	9. Puppet Master 5

**This chapter is NOT nice, if anyone is squeamish at all, please don't read it.**

**Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters.**

After Mary had made the calls she stepped back into the room, Chuck looked at her over Sarah's head and she gave him a thumbs up to let him know that they were all OK. Chuck smiled and nodded then reached out an arm towards her, Mary wasn't normally a hugger but after the wringer they'd all been put through in the last couple of hours, she was ready to change, and as soon as she was in reach she had one of her son's arms and one of her daughter in law's arms around her. They stood like that for about five minutes until one of the strike team came to the door to tell them that they were wanted downstairs.

In the Intersect lab, Shaw, Bentley, Laszlo and Manoosh were still alive, Ricky and Vicky had been killed in the fighting with the rest but these four sat down and surrendered. Casey had stopped Carina from finishing them off until they heard what Chuck wanted them to do. Chuck and Sarah looked each other in the eye, neither spoke a word but after about 30 seconds Chuck nodded slightly and let go of her hand as he turned to the prisoners. He walked up to Shaw, who sneered much in the same manner that Graham had, quite sure that Chuck would order them taken into custody. Yes, Chuck had shot him once, but that was in the heat of the moment and this time he was unarmed and in shackles, no threat to anyone. Chuck didn't say a word and his eyes and face were totally devoid of emotion, he just looked at Shaw for about 30 seconds and them drew a pistol from his holster. Shaw started babbling and pleading then, telling him that this wasn't him, he couldn't do this,. The words were very familiar to Chuck, and then he realised where they both remembered them from, it was what he'd said to Shaw when he was trying to save Sarah on the bridge in Paris. Chuck had cocked his head to the side with a frown as he was trying to remember, but his expression cleared as he brought his head up again, and he finally spoke, saying "Those lines didn't work for me in Paris, either", as he squeezed the trigger three times, ensuring that the majority of Shaw's brain was sprayed over the wall behind him, and that there was no chance of revival. When he walked up to Laszlo, the mad genius didn't say a word, just smiled at him as if he was grateful that it would all be over, and with a few more squeezes of the trigger it was. Manoosh wasn't interested in going out with dignity, he begged, grovelled, pleaded and soiled himself, but a few seconds later he was gone as well. He then walked up to Bentley and stood, looking at her, she didn't try to beg, she just looked defiantly back at Chuck. After the staring contest had gone on for about a minute, he just holstered his pistol and turned to walk away, she wasn't a genius who could build WMDs out of household supplies, she didn't have a head full of secrets that could change the world, she wasn't an immediate threat to them, or anyone else really. Casey argued that they couldn't leave her to join the next fight against them, but Chuck shook his head, repeating that she wasn't a threat, in the end Casey said that he accepted that that was Chuck's position, then said "this is mine" as he pulled his pistol and walked up to Bentley to put a bullet between her eyes.

The strike team members were looking at them in horror, wondering what kind of psychos they were dealing with, and that was reinforced when Sarah turned to the strike team leader and told him that they had to put at least one bullet in the head of every body in the building. He argued that there was no need, it was just defiling the dead, so finally she just grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him across to Shaw's body, bending down to rip his shirt open and point at the tight grouping of bullet hole scars over the heart, she got up in the guy's face, telling that Shaw had been dead, her husband killed him, but he was brought back, the only way to ensure that that DIDN'T happen was to blow their brains out, so that was what he and his men were going to do to every body, starting with Ricky and Vicky (pointing at their bodies), and the two very large bodies on the third floor, to make sure that no dangerous enemy personnel could be recovered, did he understand? He looked at her, looked down at Shaw's chest, then back at her and nodded.

While the soldiers were dealing with the bodies, Chuck and the others went to secure the disks from the computer systems in the building, as they still had to ensure that they cleaned up the remnants of BGRU, and their own data was the best way to track them down. As Chuck went to leave the room, Casey stopped with a surprisingly gentle hand on his shoulder, when Chuck looked up he held a flask out to him, Chuck gave him a nod of thanks as he took it, unscrewing the top and taking a swig as he walked out the door, he stopped and hacked at the first swig, as it was at least 150 proof, probably way more, but he took his second swig straight away and kept swigging from the flask as he went down the hall. Casey looked after him with pain in his eyes, as he'd said to Ellie years ago, Chuck would do what he had to, but it came close to destroying him when he did.

On the flight home, no-one spoke, Sarah lay in Chuck's arms and Mary sat beside him, holding his hand, everyone else sat by themselves, each doing what they had to to process what they'd been through, and what they'd done. When they got home, they were glad to see that Stefan had followed orders, and the safe room did not get opened until he confirmed that it was really them at the door and there was no-one else in Castle Carmichael. The kids were confused and a little frightened when they were immediately grabbed and hugged by their parents, holding them as if they'd never let go, they could tell something was very wrong, but they didn't know what.

When they'd had a few hours to settle down, Chuck and Stefan got started on cracking the disks that they brought back, while Sarah and Carina went to DC to have a talk with Bella. They had to get the full story of the role that she'd been inserted for, and everyone who had been involved in setting up her identity for that role, another thing that was critically important to them was to extract what the plans for the kids had been, they had managed to find out that Bella was to take Charlie and Clara as well as Sarah's four children, and the idea of what they may be planning for them, especially Clara, was horrifying to Sarah and Carina.

Chuck and Stefan were making good headway on the disks, the encryption was pretty much the same as they'd already cracked on the files they'd extracted via the portal, so they were managing to do more in a day as they had in a week before. As soon as they'd extracted the data from the files they passed it on to the others for analysis, and it was going as a steady stream. Even early in the piece, they were seeing a LOT of intel that they hadn't found via the portal, so the exercise was going to be a valuable one.

When Sarah and Carina started the session with "Bella", they stuck to the plan, extract every piece of intel on who was involved in setting things up to make her a perfect candidate to get into Carmichael Industries (and not set off any alarm bells with the General or her people when they were going through the vetting process) BEFORE they started on the segment that they would be concentrating on the most. The list of people involved in the set-up was long and worrying, because there were quite a few very senior and highly trusted names on that list (so much so that Carina often left the room to call them through to the General immediately). The fact that her "partner" was also an agent was no surprise, he'd already been picked up and was scheduled for questioning after "Bella", but the fact that her "children" had been acquired purely because they looked close enough to her to be believable WAS, one of the calls when Carina was out of the room was to get DNA tests started, and to have searches for murdered parents with a missing toddler and baby commenced (as that was the most likely scenario).

When all the intel on the creation of "Bella" was extracted and passed on, they started on the section that they were dreading. The extent that she had been read into the plans indicated that she was a very high level operative (something else Carina stepped out to pass on), as she knew about the breeding program that resulted in Sarah's children, and how promising their test results were. She also knew of Graham's specific plans for her daughters, because he'd talked to her about how much it had frustrated him not to have her like that, and how aggravated he'd been that she and Chuck had interfered with his plans, his master plan, so often (at that point Carina had to pull Sarah out of the room for a few minutes before she killed "Bella", for a start they needed more out of her in this session, and given what they'd learned so far, they both knew that they wouldn't be allowed to kill her, Graham had made sure that one of his top people was inserted into CI to keep an eye on them, that made her too valuable for the powers that be to let them eliminate her, something reinforced by the fact that there was now a strike team waiting just outside the door).

When Sarah had calmed down enough, they went back in, the sight of "Bella" sitting there smirking was almost enough to set her off again, but she held it down. Aside from Graham's personal plan for her daughters, the plans for her children were basically as expected, train them to be super spies, but with the addition of the Intersect as they were uniquely capable of dealing with it (even more than Chuck), condition them for total obedience to Graham, and use them to keep world politics in order for him. With them out of the way, it was time to find out what the plans for Charlie and Clara were, once again, Charlie was largely as expected, most of his test results were far and away above most other children, if not up to Sarah's children, so he would be a genius athlete, quite capable of being a super spy and working with his half brothers and half sisters (except for the Intersect, as his mother's genes meant that his retention capacity wasn't high enough to be an effective Intersect host), so that was what he was to be trained for, but Clara was something else.

Clara had the Bartowski genes from her mother, but her father's genes pulled her down in most areas except for physical capability and appearance. As a result, she was a very bright (but not brilliant) child who was quite capable physically, she was already very good at the various martial arts she was being trained in at home (having multiple martial arts masters available helped training opportunities), and at 11, she was already growing into the great beauty that she would be. By most standards, that would appear to put her on track to be a super spy herself, but Sarah and Carina knew what sort of sick bastards that they were dealing with, and were dreading what they would learn as they continued the questioning. The plan for Clara was to give her some training to be a spy, and obedient, but the demand for pre-teen beauties was high in many areas of the world, so she would be put to work to collect information when she was farmed out to men with those tastes, later she would get further training if she held up OK and wasn't too damaged. At that point Carina dragged Sarah out of the room and told the leader of the strike team to secure the prisoner and await direct orders from the General while she could still speak (Sarah was already beyond that point), because if they hadn't left the room they would have both killed the sick bitch who was enjoying telling them the plans. When they got into a private room they both broke down, they had seen pretty much the worst that the world had to offer in their time in the game, what they had planned for Sarah's children and Charlie pushed the limits, but to hear that bitch calmly, if not eagerly, discussing what had been planned for that beautiful little girl that they both loved was beyond anything that they could handle.

Before they left the facility to head home, they had a private meeting with the General, briefly skimming over the material they got from "Bella" and telling her to listen to the recordings if she wanted the details. She looked at them and quietly asked "Bad?" Carina shook her head and said "Beyond bad". Carina went on to say that she'd instructed the strike team leader to hold "Bella", awaiting the General's direct orders, but given the number of holes the organisation obviously had, she needed to ensure that she was properly secured immediately, she paused to look at Sarah and then looked back at the General before saying "If we find that that bitch has been allowed to escape or kill herself before you got more information out of her, after we had to hold ourselves back from killing her, you'll have to answer to us!". The General wasn't used to getting death threats from people she regarded as family as they looked her in the eye, but she nodded and silently vowed to listen the recordings after she'd had a few drinks. They discussed the fact that they weren't in any state to interrogate the "partner", so the General would have to get someone else to do that, it wasn't expected that he'd be anywhere near the level that "Bella" was, as his role was mainly part of her cover as a family woman who wanted to get out of the game for her family. With that they left and went home. When they got home they took Chuck, Casey and Mary into an interview room and locked it down so no-one outside could hear, they were all shocked, disgusted and devastated by what they were told, and everyone agreed that it was never to leave that room. What did leave that room was a determination to ensure that every part of that organisation was destroyed and that none of their evil plans would ever have a chance of being completed.

Chuck kept working with Stefan to crack the encryption on the disks and pass the files on to the others, as they progressed there was a steady stream of additional disks coming in from the other BGRU facilities that were taken down, so they had plenty of work to keep them busy. Stefan could see that something was really disturbing Chuck, but whenever he asked him about it Chuck shut down and shook his head with a strained expression on his face.

As they went through the intel on the disks there were regular calls to DC when new facilities, personnel or associations were discovered, and raids were happening all over the world to arrest senior politicians, government officials and public figures. There was considerable public outcry about the frequency with which people were being "killed resisting arrest" throughout these exercises. There was a great deal of analysis done on each member/associate/patsy of BGRU before their apprehension orders were issued. It had already been determined that the probability of being able to keep people in prison was decidedly questionable, so the prime determination of what happened when they were taken was the level of the information that could be expected to be extracted from them. The "patsies" who were on the hook to do BGRU's bidding, but weren't senior enough to do terrible things, weren't operatives, didn't hold dangerous information and weren't close enough to BGRU to know the structure or people were the primary ones who had a chance of being incarcerated. Senior patsies got a chance to convince those talking them that a) they hadn't actually used their positions to do terrible things, and b) they didn't know what they were working for, and that they'd advise who they were instructed to the moment they were contacted by anyone using the old channels, and if those apprehending them believed what they were being told and that they'd given up all information that they held, they may be incarcerated too. Part of the reasoning there was that when they got out, they wouldn't have the positions that would allow them to do terrible things any more. Those who were believed to have serious intel about BGRU or anything else were questioned, if they didn't have damaging intel and managed to convince the powers that be that they weren't a danger to anyone, they were added to the list who may, possibly, be incarcerated. For the rest, if they'd used their positions to do terrible things, were operatives who were capable of and/or had done terrible things, and if they had damaging intel on BGRU or anything else, any intel that they had was extracted and then they were eliminated (the two senators who had worked with the Woodcombs had accidents in prison after the BGRU intel they had was extracted, Mary, Casey and Sarah made that call without involving Chuck).

The methods they were using were terrible, and Chuck wasn't the only one who would be having trouble sleeping for the next few years, at least, but they had just taken down a monster and his cabal, from all the evidence just soon enough to prevent them from taking control of governments around the world. They were still trying to locate and take down the remnants of the Puppet Master's organisation and many senior people were assuredly still out there. It was obvious that one of the Puppet Master's criteria was to recruit those who were the most morally challenged, as those that they'd taken so far were vile examples of humanity, so it was imperative that the remainder was tracked down and dealt with before they escaped to do more evil business elsewhere. It was also probable that, to clean out the rest of this viper's nest, they'd have to deal with most of the world's established crime families, from the mob families to the triads, to the cartels, so realistically, most of them were expecting this to be their life's work, the job certainly wasn't going to be over soon, just about every time they took out one monster, they'd see the next one, perhaps because they stepped up to take the place of the first, perhaps because they discovered information in the first one's records, but it rarely finished with the one that they had dealt with.

The others kept asking what it was that was being kept from them. Eventually Ellie cornered Mary (planning to use the guilt of abandonment against her) and demanded to know why she was hugging Clara with tears in her eyes so often now. Mary looked at her, trying to think of a way of holding back the information, but she knew her daughter would never give up, so she told her that Sarah and Carina had got the plans for the children out of the woman they knew as Bella, most of the plans were terrible, especially to those of them who knew what you have to do as a spy, but the plans for Clara were worse. She begged Ellie not to make her tell what those plans were, and the desperation in her eyes told Ellie that she really didn't want to know, but she insisted, so her mother told her about the plan to turn Clara into a pre-teen and teen sex slave for deviants to extract information from them, and if she survived that without too much damage, then turn her into the type of spy that Carina had been forced to be. Ellie left her mother then and went looking for Carina, Carina could see from the look in her eye what she was asking when Ellie asked "Is it true?", they both cried when Carina nodded, but when Ellie's next question was what did she need to do to protect her daughter from that, Carina knew that Chuck wasn't the only one in the family who's sense of right was so deeply engrained that they'd do whatever it took to do the right thing, so she told her to talk to Chuck and Sarah.


	10. Thanks Dad

**OK, this one's a bit lighter.**

**No rights to any characters, yada, yada.**

Once Mary told Ellie about Graham's plans for Clara, it was decided that they needed to sit down with the adults of Castle Carmichael and give them at least an overview of what came from Graham, and "Bella", Graham's megalomaniacal plans were the easiest to get through, as they didn't involve them directly, but the breeding experiment hit home at everyone involved (especially Stefan), and led to some private talks between Mary and Sarah about the parallels between their scripted roles in the program. Even with the particular elements of his plans for the girls glossed over, what he had planned for the children shocked and horrified all of them, and the others now understood why Chuck, Sarah and Mary had been so on edge since the take down, Casey and Carina had thought it was about the killing, but they now realised that that was the least of it.

There was another element of the breeding plan that Chuck discovered in Graham's records when he was he was working through them with his father (as the Intersect expert) and Ellie (as their resident neurological genius), Graham's records included extensive genetic analysis of the three of them, and the prime focus of this analysis was the trigger genes which enhanced their abilities in regard to the Intersect. The key element appeared to relate to Norse bloodlines, and specifically Berserkers. There was limited test evidence recorded as the incidence of "true" Berserkers in recent times was quite rare, but the theories appeared to relate to a hyper sensitivity to adrenalin, in small doses it increased the strength, speed, co-ordination and mental acuity, so that they became supermen (or women), and neural pathways appeared to differ from "normal" people as well, in large doses (equating to instances where "normal" people perform acts of extreme strength etc due to adrenalin), the Berserkers would be out of control, far stronger and faster than anyone else could possibly be, not reacting to injures and not capable of rational thought while in that state. The extreme state was obviously not the target for the experiments, but rather the "enhanced" state, as these capabilities along with the different neural pathways enabled a capability to host and utilise the Intersect that "normal" people couldn't reach. As they had scientific data there which may help them understand what was happening to them (and the kids, and Sarah, as she was rated right up there in compatibility, too, so she must have those genes as well, which possibly explained why she was the only one other than Chuck who didn't go crazy or delusional with the Intersect, and her usual superhuman fighting abilities), they were putting all the time they could spare into looking into it. Chuck was still looking for any genetic analysis on Sarah, but hadn't found that as yet.

A few weeks after Sarah and Carina returned from DC, they got a visitor at Castle Carmichael, the General, her first priority was of course to see her daughter, but after that she asked to see Chuck, Sarah, Casey, Mary and Carina in private. Once they were in the room and in lock down, she came to the point, they'd finished the interrogation of the woman they'd known as Bella and had gotten quite a bit of intel about the BGRU organisation and Graham's plans out of her, she'd wanted to give the girls the option of dealing with her, but she didn't survive the questioning, and yes, she had personally witnessed her body being cremated, so there was no way that she was returning. Her "partner" was also gone for good, but unfortunately the children's real parents had had no family to take them in.

Everyone was quiet for a minute, then Carina asked what would happen to them, she answered that they'd go into foster care if no-one was prepared to take them in, at which point she had Carina, Casey and Sarah simultaneously saying that they'd take them. She first turned to Sarah and said that four children were enough, weren't they? and that she knew that she was mainly trying to protect them from the foster care system. When Sarah nodded, she turned to Carina, asking if she really wanted to take the children on as well as Charlie? Carina nodded with tears in her eyes, and she turned to Casey, asking if he would be happy for the children to be with Carina, as she presumed that he mainly wanted to protect them too? Casey nodded and she smiled, saying that that was good, as the paperwork was already written up for Carina and Jeff. They all looked at her accusingly and she shrugged, saying that she knew that they would all be determined to ensure the girls were looked after and safe, and that Carina would be the one with the strongest case to adopt, so it was a good bet that preparing the paperwork for Carina ahead of time would work out. Carina just held out her hand for the paperwork and went to ask Jeff (and Charlie) what they thought of the idea.

While Carina was gone they discussed the mileage that they were getting on mopping up the BGRU remnants and connections. They were still processing the disks sent in from the BGRU sites, once they cracked the encryption they'd go through all the files to determine whether there was any new intel, or whether it just confirmed what they already had. They'd also kept the searches running for the others they had on their lists that weren't confirmed dead yet, and there were more than a few big names on those lists. They'd generally get at least one or two hits a week on those searches, but they were hardly enough to be building any patterns off.

Around that time Carina returned with Jeff and the signed paperwork, asking when they could get the girls out of the system and here in a proper family environment? The General made a show of ensuring the paperwork had been completed properly, then pulled out her phone to call her aide to bring them around, saying with a grin that they'd been at the park a few streets over. The look that Carina gave her reminded her of the one that she'd given her in DC a few weeks previously, but she was sure that Carina's mood would be considerably better in a few minutes, and it was. When the SUV pulled up in the drive and the girls got out, they ran to her for a hug, and they all knew that it was going to be alright.

They weren't used to this almost playful General (or more to the point, Diane), and if she stopped to think about it, neither was she, but this "family" (which she was glad to be a part of) affected people in mysterious and usually wonderful ways, it was only since Josie's true story was outed in the family that she'd managed to have a proper relationship with her daughter (within the confines of the family), and she was only now realising how much she'd missed that before. These people could and did take on the evils of the world without hesitation, but they brought out the humanity in the most hardened examples of the species (like herself), they were, are, truly remarkable.

The girls shared a room at first, as they felt safer together, and it didn't surprise anyone that they had nightmares most nights, like Charlie had in the beginning. Carina was incredibly touched when Charlie offered the sound system from his room with the Chuckles music for the girls, because it made the bad dreams go away for him, she kissed him and thanked him, but said he could keep his, they'd give the girls their own one. Charlie was right, when she set up a sound system with Chuck's singing repeating all night, the girls' nightmares dropped off as quickly as his had. She hoped that the girls didn't have anything to compare to Charlie's nightmares about Bryce to haunt them, but that household would have been terrible, especially with that evil bitch there. Sarah gave Carina "the look" when she joyfully went up to Chuck to hug and kiss him one morning a few weeks after the girls moved in, until she explained that playing Chuck's recordings at night were working to get rid of the girls' nightmares the way they had Charlie's (and that it was Charlie's idea).

There was another reason that Sarah was questioning of Carina's kissing Chuck, since the take down of the Puppet Master and the core BGRU facilities, he'd been going into overdrive with training, usually spending a couple of hours a night down in the main gyms in the bunkers trying to work himself to exhaustion in an attempt to get some sleep, and the effects were very quickly becoming noticeable. Chuck had always been relatively fit, more so after he went into training after he downloaded the Intersect 2.0, but these nightly workouts and sparring sessions that he was having with anyone who happened to be up were getting him ripped, he was looking like the stereotype rugged, powerful spy he used to envy now and all the girls were noticing. Sarah didn't like to think of herself as jealous, she knew that Chuck loved her and that she was the most beautiful woman in the world to him, but seeing other women looking at him that way, even her best friends, got her hackles up. That was part of the reason (probably a large part if she wanted to be honest) for her to talk Casey to letting Heather move into one of the bedrooms in his place, so that she wasn't down in the bunkers alone with Chuck most nights.

It was a few months down the track from the take down, when things seemed to be getting back to "normal" (as much as that word fitted them), that the next bombshell dropped, Sarah got a call from the General, asking her to come up and see her as soon as she had a chance, she asked if Chuck should come and got a distracted reply that that would probably be a good idea, so intrigued and worried, they called for one of the SonicStars to be ready and headed to the airport when Ellie came over to keep an eye on the kids. As they so often were, they grateful that they'd managed to get the SonicStar development pushed up so they could always have one on the line waiting for them, as it cut the hop over to DC to a fraction of the time that the usual business jets took. The General's protection detail was waiting for them when they landed, and they were whisked in to her office as quickly as escorted official vehicles could go. When they got into the office she asked them if they'd like a drink, not a good sign, so when they politely declined she sighed and pushed a folder across the desk to them.

Sarah's first words were predictably "I'm going to kill him!" Chuck started rubbing her back to try and calm her down as he pulled the folder in front of him and started reading. Jack Burton had engaged legal aid to try and make a deal to wipe out the rest of his sentence by telling the authorities about the activities of his daughter, her husband and their associates. He'd provided snippets of things he'd seen and implied that he could tell them a lot more if they made a deal. Even what he'd told them to try to entice them into making a deal was enough to get him locked away in a supermax facility for the rest of his life, but worse than that he'd identified them, Emma and Molly in his comments and told where they all lived. They looked up at the General and asked what actions had been taken so far, and she advised that he'd been extracted from the prison, the legal aid people who'd been involved had been grabbed and put into witness protection (with very clear directions on what would happen if they EVER spoke a word about what put them there). When Sarah asked who else he'd talked to, she was told that he refused to discuss that until he saw his lawyer. She nodded and called her mother to tell her to pick up Molly and get to Castle Carmichael straight away, then asked the General where her father was.

There was no way that Chuck was letting her go in there by herself (if anyone was gong to kill Jack to would be him to save her the guilt of killing her father), but Jack made it very difficult to try for a good resolution, given that his opening words were " Hello darlin', so you've finally come to get your old man out of prison?"

When Sarah's fist lifted him and the chair off the floor so that he landed a few feet behind with the chair on top of him, Chuck had to grin as he said "Saw that one coming". If Jack had been more than half conscious he would have wondered about how easily Chuck lifted him and the chair with one hand each to set them upright in front of the table that Sarah was now sitting on. Chuck went to her, squeezed her arm and kissed her on the forehead and she reached up to squeeze his hand with a smile, as his touch had the calming affect that she so desperately needed at that point.

Her smile disappeared as she looked back at her father, reeling groggily in the chair as he whined "Why did you do that?" She just glared at him as she asked what he thought he was doing? He started rambling and trying to justify himself, and as soon as Chuck saw where he was going with that he started a silent mantra "Don't play the all I did for you card, don't play the all I did for you card..." but of course he did, and Sarah (quite rightly) went ballistic, demanding to know what he'd ever done for her, and finally letting herself ask him if he had any idea what she'd been put through, been made to do to keep him alive? When Jack came back with a snide crack about how she'd obviously done pretty well for herself with her cushy government job and family and her flash house and cars so life hadn't been that bad for her, he was hit again, and this time he and the chair bounced off the wall because it was Chuck who hit him, a Chuck who was so furious that he was screaming in his face that he never had the right to say anything like that to her after what she'd gone through for him. Sarah pulled him off and held him and kissed him, trying to calm him down, she'd only ever seen him in a state anywhere near close to this twice before, and she couldn't stand seeing him like this. Meanwhile Jack lay on the floor, dazed and terrified, as he'd been sure that Chuck was going to kill him, his daughter was supposed to feel guilty and her husband was supposed to talk her into getting him out, not try to kill him, why would they react like that to what he said? He was the master at reading people and her husband was the soppy schnook who always calmed her down and got her to do with the happy family thing, yeah he'd been mad when he was arrested but that was years ago, they were supposed to have forgiven him ages ago.

They left him crumpled on the floor as Sarah concentrated on calming Chuck down, when Chuck was OK Sarah turned back to her father, kicking him in the gut when speaking to him didn't get his attention. Once she had it she told him to shut up and listen, she was only going to say this once. The stupid little scam he tried to pull to get out of serving his time for what he did had exposed national secrets and endangered her family, her mother and Molly. Emma and Molly wouldn't be able to live in their house any more in case anyone had actually gotten wind of what he'd been telling people about them being family and went after them, they would have to double or triple the security measures around their kids and not be able to give them the freedom to enjoy their childhood for the same reason, so he had once again destroyed the happiness of their entire family for his petty little whims. She then asked who he'd said any of this to other than his lawyers, when he started rambling again she kicked him in the guts and repeated the question, at which point he mumbled half a dozen names. Sarah looked at Chuck and he nodded to say that he had the names, she turned back to her father and asked if there was anyone else? He just looked at him so she kicked him again and repeated the question, so he said no.

Now the penalty for what he'd done to breach national secrets was generally death, but the powers that be had waived that because he was supposed to be family, he was gong to get his wish, he was getting out of the prison that he was in because he was going into a government supermax facility, and that's where he would stay for the rest of his life. How long that life was would depend entirely on whether he kept his mouth shut or not, if he mentioned anything about anyone in the family, or our associates, or the things that he claimed that they'd done, or asked for any lawyers, well we've agreed that the standard approach should be taken when national secrets are put at risk. There were no more chances, he'd had more than his share. She took Chuck's hand and turned to the door, stopping to turn back and say that the only person in the family that would be talking to him after this was Carina, and she most definitely remembered what she'd told him when he went to prison, so if she came to see him there was only one way for it to go. With that they walked out, leaving him on the floor for someone else to deal with, had a talk to the General about the names that she'd gotten out of her father and what should happen to him if he continued this at all, and then returned home.

Obviously Emma wasn't happy about the fact that they'd have to leave their home, but when Sarah explained the risks that existed if anyone came after them when they were out there, unprotected, she understood, especially when Sarah told her that it could be worse than when they were hiding Molly from Reiker. Chuck and Sarah had already talked to his parents and Ellie, and they were thrilled with the idea of Emma and Molly moving in with them, so once it was discussed with Emma and Molly and they agreed, all that was required was to move the things that they wanted in from their house, and sell the house.

Things were rather snug nowadays as nearly every room was taken in most of the houses, since they'd built Castle Carmichael as it was now Jaqui and Piotr had come along, Zondra had joined the team and moved in, Charlie had been adopted and moved in, Josie had moved in, Heather had moved in, Susie and Wendy had been adopted and moved in, and now Emma and Molly had moved in. Chuck looked at the situation and tried to work out a viable solution, so he sketched up a modification to the houses, adding filler sections to bridge between the two houses on each side, these would essentially make the original four houses into two really large houses (in effect mansions) on the outside, but still be effectively six houses on the inside, the original four at five to six bedrooms, and the smaller middle two at three or four bedrooms, the two new ones would also have two or three car garages for the extra vehicles. When he ran it past the others, everyone loved the idea so they got the blueprints done up properly and fast tracked, then got work started ASAP. As always, having almost unlimited funds to throw at the project made it happened all that much faster, and it was done within a couple of months. The beauty of the changes was that they didn't really lose any usable space, as the area between the houses was pretty much dead space, so they gained about 7 bedrooms and the rest, and they still had the common yard to use.

When they were done, Emma and Molly took the middle house on the side with Mary and Casey, and Zondra, Josie and Heather took the middle house on Sarah and Carina's side, and everyone had room to move again. Heather's position was settling in more, the longer she was there. Theoretically she was still there because the BGRU situation was still a long way from being finished, but she'd come through on the Intersect facility raid and on many others since then. She'd proven her loyalty and worth, and she was one of the girls now, so while she was officially a temporary member of the Clan, no-one doubted that she was there to stay.


	11. Minions

**Usual disclaimer for the land of litigation, no rights to any characters portrayed**.

Chuck eventually found the genetic analysis for Sarah buried in Graham's files, and as expected Sarah had the same Beserker genetic markers as he and Ellie did (and to a lesser degree their father, Chuck was still hunting genetic records for his mother, but the margin that he and Ellie had over their father father implied that their mother also carried the Berseker genes to a degree as well, which could also explain why Mom was such a bad ass herself). They had yet to work out what the actual differences in the neural pathways that made them better Intersect hosts were, but that was Ellie's speciality, she was the neurologist, and she was working on it. The main thing that Chuck got from that was Sarah and the kids should be safer if they came in contact with the Intersect, and that their kids WOULD be little superheros (though they didn't wear capes much). Basically, the signs were there already, but there was every reason to expect that their kids would at least match Sarah's fighting etc abilities, possibly even exceed them as they had the genes from both sides. Given the fact that they now knew that the family would be at risk for years, if not forever, that gave Chuck and Sarah a small amount of comfort, and Sarah concentrated on training the kids as well as they could to look after themselves, while still trying to make it fun because, well, they were kids.

Even though Chuck hated Graham and everything he'd done, he had to be impressed (from a purely scientific viewpoint) with the ground breaking scientific analysis and planning that had gone into the breeding program that they were all part of. They'd managed to identify and isolate the gene markers to get the specific attributes and outcomes that they wanted thirty five years ago, and then engineered the situations to put the people with the best mix of those gene markers together to procreate, he'd never heard of pure science being used in human genetics that way before (possibly because it was so inhuman, unethical, illegal and just plain WRONG?)

Stefan and Ellie were working together on the Intersect whenever they had a chance, trying to optimise it for the human brain, and in particular the Bartowski brain, as an optimised Intersect would give them their best chance when people came after them. Chuck was the obvious guinea pig for this as he was proven to be the most resilient person alive (if not ever) in regard to the Intersect, and all testing would be done on him. He put his foot down when Sarah suggested (or more to the point, insisted) that she share the testing, as that would put risk on both of them (not actually mentioning the kids but leaving the need for them to be looked after hanging over the issue), and he wanted to make sure it was safe before she tried it. As usual she wasn't happy about him taking risks, but conceded his point in this instance.

With everyone settled into the revised Castle Carmichael now, it was amusing how "normal" the spy clan looked sometimes, Ellie, Carina, Kathleen and Emma now had their own "special" Odysseys too (well actually Kathleen and Emma's were Chuck and Sarah's original pair, the new batch were uprated in performance, armour and armament, they could handle 25mm bombardments and the Thumpers now each carried a cylinder of rounds and a pair of SAW versions of the CI assault rifles each carrying about 3 times the ammo of the assault rifles in a pair of axial mags, and Sarah and Chuck could make use of the extra capabilities far more than the Clan's civilians) and each school day there were two carpooling trips to school, one would drop off and pick up Yvonne, Zack, Jaqui, Piotr and Wendy, and the other would drop off/pick up Molly, Clara, Charlie and Susie. (One drop off/pick up would always be Sarah or Chuck, the other was usually Ellie or Carina.) For all their "normal" appearance, they certainly had enough armoured vehicles to carry everyone safely now, with the six Odysseys, three armoured SUVs and Casey's Crown Vic (he'd never give that up), but of course they also had Sarah's Shooting Brake, Mary's SportBrake, Zondra's (previously Sarah's and Carina's) Lotus and a few other flashy sporty cars that were more in keeping with the expected image.

With BGRU's back broken, Carmichael Industries was once again taking on contracts and going back to work, they were still putting a fair bit of effort into the mop up exercise, and that would be an on-going thing, but they were starting to pick their "normal" lives up again. With Bella gone, the General organised for a few new CI "staff" that she could personally vouch for. Of course, she had a secret plan which she had cooked up with Casey to select those "staff". Given that Alex and Josie's relationships hadn't panned out, and the situation was less volatile now, the single girls (Zondra, Heather, Josie, Alex and Ellie) had started going out partying and playing up again, and that worried their parents no end. Therefore, it wasn't a coincidence that the "staff" that the General organised for CI were made up of the type of gorgeous and nice young guys that she and Casey would like to see their daughters with, how that would pan out, especially as both daughters were quite bright enough to see through what they were doing, was going to be interesting to watch.

A few months after the (new) incident with Sarah's dad, they got hits on the ongoing BGRU scanning that indicated that Riley and the Ring Director had popped up in L.A. (along with Jasmine, who apparently hadn't died when they blew up Hartley's mother's house, or more to the point, she blew up her house to get Volkoff's people) while Riley was Volkoff's minion, and the Director was the Ring elders', they had been significant parts of those organisations, managing and running them to a large degree, so those two rated considerable attention and suspicion, and Jasmine was a dangerous and resourceful operative as well. So Clan Carmichael was back on alert while they sorted out what these people planned to do, and how to deal with them.

The kids (especially Molly) would have been mortified if they realised that they were being tracked and monitored every second that they were outside Castle Carmichael, but ever since the BGRU situation came up, everyone was, the girls had tried to insist that the monitoring be dropped when they were out partying but they finally caved in when they had to accept the very real risks they were all under. While the girls could understand the need to monitor, the kids wouldn't (especially Molly who'd been leading the life of a fairly normal teenager up until Jack screwed that up for them), so the "big screen" in the bunker normally displayed live security camera footage of them (and anyone else when outside) showing wherever they went, using a mix of their tracker signals and image recognition to ensure the best camera coverage (a slight modification of the algorithms that Chuck had created years ago to search for people).

Sarah would often watch Molly on the screens with tears in her eye, happy that she was able to be a teenager, and see her being happy with her friends (and boys), but at the same time sad that they needed to watch over her this way to keep her safe. Chuck would often come up behind her and hug her when she was like this, knowing that part of what she was thinking about was the sacrifices that she and Emma had made to give Molly a normal life, only to have that ruined by her father's selfish attempt to look after himself, as usual. Sometimes Chuck could make her laugh, like when he said that this gave the term Big Brother a whole new meaning (she had managed to give herself a proper education, in spite of her father's attempts to the contrary), other times the attempt fell flat, like when he mentioned how much harder it would be with their own girls and Clara, as Molly was a pretty enough girl, but no beauty, but their girls took after their mother, so they would be stunning beauties, as would Clara. Chuck and Casey had already scared off a string of would be boyfriends for Molly because they'd seen what they got up to with the girls, no it would NOT be fun when it was his own daughters or his niece.

Watching what the boys at Molly's school got up to was what led to her finding out that she was being monitored, she was being chatted up by one of the serial seducers one day, and she was just at the point of getting into his car when Sarah called her phone to tell her that if she got into that car she'd be grounded for the next ten years at least. Molly sparked up and started arguing with Sarah, but when he tried to force her into the car the defence training that they'd engrained into her kicked in, and she broke his arm in three places, smashed his knee and ensured that he wouldn't be seducing any girls for a long time, if ever (ruptured testicles has that effect). Sarah got there at that point and whisked Molly away in her Shooting Brake, and when the boy's parents tried to get Molly expelled and sue them for damages, Sarah, Chuck and Emma had a meeting with them in the principal's office, where they showed them and the principal footage of what actually happened, and also footage of the other girls he'd forced into sex on school premises (as well as others he'd taken away from the school, like Molly, presumably to do it somewhere else where he could control them). At that point they started to threaten to sue for breach of privacy, and called Molly a slut who already had a reputation and Chuck smiled, the father jumped up and wanted to go at it with him, then and there, and was even more infuriated when Chuck shook his head with a smile, saying that his wife would kick his ass if he got in her way at that point. Sarah was on her feet by then and quietly asked the father whether he accepted responsibility for making his son into a copy of himself, a sleazy rapist who preyed on innocent girls, which was enough to get him to attack her. Chuck did jump up and stop her when she was about to finish him, to prevent the situation getting serious, she'd done much more damage to the father than Molly had done to the son, but the principal had witnessed him attack her first, which meant that she clearly did that in self defence. If she killed him it would have been something else, so when Chuck saw the moves leading to that start to form, he jumped up (faster than the principal would have thought possible) and grabbed her wrist, pulling her into his embrace as she started to cry. They left the footage with the principal and the school contacted the parents of those girls to explain to them what had happened to their daughters, as Chuck had told them to expect, on the basis of the patterns witnessed, the girls had been threatened with physical harm and/or being outed as serial sluts if they'd told anyone (including the parents), so a number of parents only found out how their daughters had become to be pregnant when they were contacted by the school. The only upside of that experience was that Molly became very popular with the girls in her school for her part in stopping the forced sex culture, as Chuck and Sarah had also supplied footage of the other boys doing similar things to the school. The talk to Molly about why they were all being monitored whenever they were away from home wasn't fun, as they had to explain that there were bad people out there who were still after them, and why she and Emma had to leave their house and move into Castle Carmichael. Sarah and Emma had talked about this previously, and Emma was there to help explain that Jack wasn't actually her father, she had been adopted because her parents had been killed when she was a baby, but she had been rescued and taken away to be left with Emma to look after and raise. When Molly wanted more details Emma looked at Sarah but she shook her head, not wanting to go there until Molly got really upset, so she gave in and stepped up to tell her the whole story, just glossing over how much killing was involved, both when she rescued her and when Reiker came after her ten years ago.

In between their own personal big brother coverage and working, they were trying to track down Riley, the Director and Jasmine to work out what they were doing, and the reasons behind them being here. The tracking them down part was made a little easier by the fact that they'd been monitoring most of the significant criminal organisations ever since BGRU reared its head, especially the ones that BGRU had dealt with, and to get manpower and other resources the trio had to go to them, so they turned up on the radar as soon as they did. Unfortunately that meant that they had to warn the girls not to go out partying and cancel some of the kids' outings because they had confirmation that the newcomer trio were, in fact, there because they were coming after Clan Carmichael, or at least parts of it. One of the outings that they couldn't cancel was the father daughter dance at Molly's high school, because Molly had begged Chuck to take her, she'd never had a father for any important event of her life and her girl friends drooled over Chuck whenever she got dropped off at school by her hottie brother-in-law, so she desperately wanted to show off and be the centre of attention for once. They could give her that, he'd be with her for protection and one of the others would be nearby for back-up, so she'd be safe enough.

The thing that the other side still didn't realise was that most of Carmichael Industries was made up of very good experienced operatives, Sarah, Casey, Chuck, Mary and Carina were among the best there ever was, and Zondra, Josie and Heather weren't too far behind, Stefan and Jeff had both been extremely skilled in spying on people for decades, and Alex and Ellie both had oodles of potential and were being trained by the very best. So for a small organisation of effectively a dozen people (for now), they actually had better resources than most organisations a hundred times their size. That was how they were able to crack the criminal organisations that Riley, the erstwhile Ring Director and Jasmine went to for assistance and get the full details of their plans. The trio hadn't managed to get the location of Castle Carmichael (nor had they apparently gotten the location of the kids' schools, as they weren't staking out the school as Jill had, it looked like Graham had played that card close to his chest) So they were staking out the CI offices to track the CI people, without having much luck as the actual CI team was mostly staying away from the office, and if they did need to go in there they'd swap cars for one of the half dozen that they always had stored in the CI car park, so the watchers would be sitting there waiting for the car that entered to come out, but it would still be in there several hours later.

From what they gleaned from the communications taps and bugs, the trio was looking to grab someone from CI who was significant enough to use as a figurehead, but not dangerous enough to defeat them when they tried the grab, for this reason Chuck, Sarah and Casey were ruled out as they didn't have the army or resources to have a chance of grabbing them without killing them. The prime targets therefore were Mary and Carina, as they were recognisable as significant CI people, but were judged to be a lot "softer" targets than the other three (Chuck, Sarah and Casey couldn't keep the grins off their faces when Mary and Carina heard the recording of that discussion, as they went off in a big way, saying that they'd show them fukn soft targets). They also admitted their real plan when they were trying to negotiate the resources they needed. The point was that it was CI who took their organisation down (like the rest of the significant take downs in the last 10 years), but there were still significant organisation people and resources out there (in hiding for now). So the plan was that they were going to show the others that they could hit back at Carmichael Industries by grabbing a recognisable CI figure and parading them around enough to get enough support to band the remnants together under their control, and then kill them. The plan once they had control of course was to mount a strike to wipe out the rest of CI, so they could settle down and enjoy running their new organisation in peace (they were obviously glossing over the fact that they had no idea how to find the rest of CI, they were probably planning on someone else in the organisation being able to find them once they got control of it).

Now that they knew the plans, and the targets, they sat down to decide how to handle trapping the trio and dealing with their associates. The most obvious approach was use honey pots, set up a number of houses and lead them back to one to take them down, possibly doing the interrogations there. After that, any organisation which was supplying resources to the trio would be taken down and dismantled, but the most important information to them was the location and details of the remnants of BGRU that the trio was trying to get control of. Mary volunteered to be the bait (as Carina was a mother with young children now, one of them being her own grandson), but as none of the trio were present when she was grabbed, she let herself be captured and taken back to them, they knew that the trio needed to keep her alive for their plan to work, so the most she would have to endure would be a bit of torture, if that. Mary was in the game long enough that a bit of torture was nothing she couldn't handle. As soon as they confirmed that the trio was present, the CI team went in with a strike team that the General supplied (one of the ones that they'd used before, as they were the only ones that CI trusted enough to work with), neutralising the mob family that supplied the manpower and resources and leaving the trio to CI to process.

As expected Jasmine had little to offer (she was largely tits and muscle, used to seduce and attack, competent but not part of the inner circle like the other two), so she didn't take long to process, the erstwhile Ring Director and Riley, however, were quite helpful in supplying leads to the BGRU remnants that they were trying to recruit. Chuck had to take over the Ring Director's interrogation as he was starting to succeed in baiting Sarah about her relationship with Shaw, which may have cut the interrogation short and made them miss out on getting all the intel they needed from him, so he stepped in, sent her out of the room and took over. Only then did the Director realise that he had just made his situation worse by trying to bait Sarah into killing him, because through the intersect Chuck knew even more than Sarah about torture techniques, and he wrung the man dry before he finished him. As he'd already stepped in, he conducted Riley's interrogation too, to save Sarah the angst of doing it (she may still be the best in the business, but that didn't mean that doing those things didn't get to her nowadays). Once they had what they needed from the trio they took did a run through of the mob people left alive and Chuck interrogated anyone that he flashed on who was senior enough to have serious information, then they took any and all computer and hardcopy records that they could get their hands on and they left the clean-up to the strike team.

Processing the information that they took away from the operation took them a week or so, they had enough to orchestrate taking down the mob family that had been involved, and track down and deal with a significant portion of what was left of BGRU. That made them busy for the next couple of months, organising the raids on the BGRU facilities and people around the world via the General and the President's team. The operations were still quite dangerous, possibly even more so now as the BGRU remnants now knew what to expect when they were taken (interrogation and death), so they fought harder than they probably would have back when they were smug and arrogant, those who were left now quite literally fought like the cornered rats that they were.

It was the connections in high places who were the biggest problem, they were still coming out of the woodwork as well, and it was a lot more difficult to quietly take a senior government official or other public figure for interrogation and then dispose of them without questions being asked. The "shot resisting arrest" explanation couldn't be used any more, due to the media furor that arose during the primary purge (where thousands were dealt with), so accidents and heart attacks were the primary story now. It also made it difficult to use the tried and true method of ensuring that no-one could recover the body and revive it (blow their brains out), so for public figures the practice was usually to use large amounts of high voltage electricity or acid to burn the brain away (generally after they were dead) the autopsy reports had to be directed or doctored to cover the true facts of the matter, but that was a lot simpler than dealing with public opinion via the media.

In a way there was a silver lining in the clean up of the public figures working for BGRU and other nefarious organisations, the rest of them were now seeing the potential ramifications of their actions, and starting to weigh the whether the benefits (the girls, drugs, money or whatever other pay-offs they were getting for their information and assistance to the dirty organisations) really outweighed the price of their actions, seeing as how many of their compatriots in crime were having accidents, disappearing or were being killed outright when they resisted being arrested (and those left alive knew their type well enough to know that the ones who were taken would never have been brave enough to actually physically resist arrest, so the "resistance" would have been arguing with those who turned up to take them). Anyway, seeing what the true price of the lifestyle that they'd been enjoying was coming to be in the current environment was leading to many of them being "scared straight" and going to the authorities to admit minor infractions that they'd made and spill everything that they knew, in hope that they may live through the new order. So yeah, there was some good (such as it were) that came from the situation, honest (well more honest, anyway) politicians, who'd have thunk it?


	12. Troll

**Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters.**

Sarah stood in the shadows at Molly's father daughter dance and watched her husband with her adopted sister and her friends, at least Molly's friends were still dressed tonight, most times when they came over for soccer practice at the Castle they ended up in the pool, and half of them always "forgot" to bring their suits, so they'd go for a swim and lay around drying off in their underwear, or just their panties, OK she could see that they were crushing on Chuck, but they didn't need to be so damn obvious about it. Speaking of obvious, the way that Stacy had just climbed into Chuck's lap and was hugging him had definitely crossed the line, so Sarah stepped out into the light and waited the few seconds it took for Chuck to see her and give her his special smile that was just for her. Stacy turned to see what Chuck was smiling at, and then scrabbled out of his lap frantically when she met Sarah's glacial stare. Chuck sent Sarah a thank you look with another smile once Stacy was safely out of his lap. Sarah didn't need to hear them to know what Stacy was saying, but she keyed the bug on Molly to listen in anyway. "Shit Molly, why didn't you tell me that your sister was here, she looks like she wants to kill me!" Molly's innocent response of "Sarah's here?" as she looked around was perfect, as she'd known all along that the only way that she was going to get her night out was with Sarah there to back up Chuck.

Once she'd scared off the would be competition, Sarah went back to watching Chuck with Molly and thinking about what a perfect man she had married. It also made her think about Carina's ongoing need for advice about raising Charlie. As no-one was near her at that point she keyed the communicator to initiate a private link to Carina. When Carina came on she asked what was up, worried that something may be going down. Sarah told her that there was nothing wrong, she just wanted to talk to her about something, then she asked her if she remembered asking them all for tips on how to be a good mother? Carina's response would not have been at all appropriate if said out loud at an event like the one she was currently at, so Sarah grinned and let her go on for a while before she calmed her down and got serious again. She jumped straight into it, telling her that the one person she HAD to listen to on raising Charlie was Ellie, she'd raised the perfect gentleman, someone who would always do the right thing around women, or men for that matter, so there was no better person to give her advice on raising Chuck's son properly than the woman who actually raised Chuck, and for that matter Clara showed that she was pretty damn good at raising daughters, too. Carina laughed at her, telling her that she thought everything to do with Chuck was perfect, but she softly agreed that she was right and thanked her for reminding her, as Ellie had done an incredible job with Chuck (and Clara), and that was part of the reason that everyone loved them.

At that time Chuck caught her eye and waved her over with that smile of his, so she said goodbye and signed off with Carina, and went to have a dance with her husband, they were so wrapped up in each other that they didn't realise that almost every eye in the room was on them, and that they'd crushed or confirmed (mainly crushed) most of the men in the room's hopes for sex that night, because any guy who made any sort of crude or disparaging comments about the couple was written off by their wives or partners as being a useless waste of time for being incapable of recognising something so wonderful and romantic. At the end of the night Chuck left Molly and Sarah at the entrance while he went to get the Shooting Brake. He courteously handed Molly into the car, and kissed Sarah goodbye, telling her that he'd see her at home soon (she'd come in the Odyssey in case that they had any need for secure transport to be available), before taking off to give Molly a wild ride home in her sister's sports car.

Things were fairly quiet at that time around Carmichael Industries, the intel that they got from the BGRU trio (Riley, the erstwhile Ring Director and Jasmine) have ultimately made it possible to scratch several hundred names off the lists that they were keeping watch for (still leaving several thousand yet to be accounted for unfortunately), but of course that was offset by the fact that the mob families affiliated with the one they took down for assisting the trio in coming after them were now trying to organise retaliations against them for that, but they were used to the bad guys of the world gunning for them, that was where they lived. The slack(er) time at least gave them more time to work on the Intersect and genetics research that they'd been chasing down since they got the information out of Graham. Given that Sarah had just been talking to Carina about Charlie, she pointed out that they really should fill her (and Jeff) in on how Graham's breeding plan affected Charlie. Chuck and Ellie agreed immediately, and overruled their father's natural reticence about sharing any information about his family (he would agree once he saw past his standard reaction, so they just saved time by overruling him up front), as Charlie WAS family (he was his grandson), and so were Carina and Jeff.

In a way it was good for Chuck, with Jeff being as much of a sci-fi nut as he was, the common sci-fi element of breeding perfect soldiers (or spies in this case) brought up all the same images in Jeff's mind as they did in Chuck's, so they had fun tossing those references back and forth for a few minutes. Sarah watched them doing that with a smile and noticed how some of Chuck's cares were dropping away from him during the brief interlude. She realised for the first time just how much this was affecting him, having to find out that he, his sister and their children were all the results of some psychopath's twisted plan to breed a new master race. Yes, it affected her that her children were part of this plan and that she'd been dragged into it, too, but she wasn't a direct result of it, while Chuck was, so it sat so much heavier on him than it did on her. That made her start berating herself for not realising this before, as it was so obvious now as she was watching him. She had another thought and gave a wry grin as she realised that the last psychopath who tried to breed a master race like this probably would have tried to wipe out Graham and his entire race if he'd managed to succeed, but overall she was glad that that twisted little bastard had failed too.

As usual when things seemed to be going better, they had to change, when they got a call from the General to come up to DC a few months after they'd finished the mopping up exercise after they dealt with the trio they were trying to work out what it was about. It couldn't be Jack, Sarah was serious when she told him that they'd all agreed that this was his last chance, the first time he tried anything else he was going to be terminated, it could have been about Devon Woodcomb, but the General would have given Ellie the courtesy of being part of the discussion if it was, surely? They spent the flight going through the options, but couldn't think of anything obvious.

When they landed at DC they once again had the General's protection detail waiting for them to whisk them in to her office. She didn't offer them a drink this time, so maybe it wasn't as bad as the Jack situation? Her expression was a pretty good match, though, and she sat there and looked at them for about 30 seconds before she slid a folder across the desk to them. Sarah pulled the folder to her and opened it to read its contents. Her reaction was different this time, much less enraged as she just shrugged and said "Kill him" after spending less than a minute reading, handing the folder over to Chuck.

When he looked at the file, Chuck realised that the situation was in fact very similar to the one with Jack, and was actually potentially worse, Morgan Grimes had come out of the wood work and was trying to sell what he knew to the tabloids, and the problem was that he actually knew far more than Jack did. The standard protocols demanded exactly what Sarah had said, he had to be terminated, but the big question was how to handle the situation without kicking off a media circus.

Chuck didn't take long to come up with a plan, one which (not surprisingly) actually gave Morgan a chance to live, although it was likely that the General or someone else on the government side would insist on a chemical lobotomy to protect the secrets in his head if he was allowed to live.

Chuck's plan meant creating a different "real" identity for Morgan, which left "Morgan Grimes" as a fictitious identity that he'd created for himself in his head. The plan needed Morgan to be someone that no-one would believe, or like, but what he laid out actually shocked the General and Sarah, as Morgan would be Lester Burton, a mentally handicapped and disturbed man who was a serial child molester, he'd managed to get away from the last facility he as in years ago and had immediately re-offended, and he'd been on the run ever since. The names of his victims included Sarah, Alex, Ellie, Diane, Carina, Chuck, Casey, Bryce, Daniel, Mike, Lester, Jeff and a dozen or so more names from the life he'd lived. The back-story on that was that he'd created the spy world fantasy life with the name Morgan Grimes that he lived in, in his head, and all the characters in that world had been named after his victims.

As Chuck was laying it out for them, they could see that it was quite plausible, and would give a reasonable explanation for everything he might say (Carmichael Industries had been in the news a few times when agency people let the name slip, and Chuck and Sarah's actual names had been mentioned as well, so he could have seen them on TV and added that to his fantasy world). Also, the fact that the Buy More, Castle and the Echo Park apartment complex had all ceased to exist almost ten years ago would tear more holes in his credibility, especially considering that he could have seen the Buy More at least on the news when it blew up in the "accident". The plan had a good chance of working, and it was the only way that Morgan could get out of this alive, IF he embraced the crazy/handicapped angle and accepted being incarcerated in a mental asylum for the rest of his life, otherwise the government would most definitely kill him to protect its secrets. Of course they'd need records to cover his entire life to support his ongoing mental and criminal issues, but everyone in the room knew (without discussing it) that Chuck had already created far more convincing records for Stefan, which had stood up to scrutiny several orders of magnitude more stringent than anything regarding Morgan would. The fact that he was going to have to recreate the lives of just about everyone in Clan Carmichael, and lay out records to show their new "actual" life path were another big issue, but he wanted to sit down to discuss it with the others before he wiped out their lives.

Once the General accepted the basis of Chuck's plan, Chuck had to jump onto the most time sensitive aspect of the plan, erasing any and all references to Morgan Grimes that he cold find, and scrubbing all records relating to the Burbank Buy More, as that was the primary reference point for confirmation of anything that he may have told anyone. Therefore, Chuck got himself set up with an office for a couple of hours, logged into the Carmichael Industries systems and created the search (and destroy) engines to locate and eradicate any references to Morgan Grimes ASAP. Then he got into the Buy More systems and scrubbed all employee records and images relating to the Burbank store, replacing them with faux records that disappeared after a few address changes. The fact that the Burbank Buy More disappeared nearly ten years before assisted the process, as there was no requirement to keep records beyond the document retention standard of seven years, therefore the archived records were all that could be expected to be found, so all he had to do was scrub those and insert a false set that went nowhere. Next after that was to get into the real estate systems and remove any references to any Bartowskis or Woodcombs for the rental and purchase records around the Echo Park complex, and of course wipe out all records of the government presence. For completeness, he also inserted records into other systems elsewhere to cover where the Bartowski siblings had supposedly lived for the period, there was far more that had to be done, but what he'd done so far was enough to cut off any early investigations that may have been started. Sarah had been sitting in the office with him, working on her own jobs while he was doing that, so once Chuck had finished what he had to do, they went back to the General's office to fill her in on what he'd done to date and what they'd need from her before they headed home.

On the plane, they talked the whole way home about Chuck's plan. At first Sarah was less than happy about what she saw as him making so much effort to protect the troll that spent five years trying to destroy their relationship because he saw it as something that didn't work for him, but as Chuck explained the reasoning behind his argument, she came around. As Chuck explained, it wasn't really about Morgan (not all of it, anyway), it was only that the situation had came to the fore due to him. They were all at risk if the other side could track them down, that was a given, and the issue of Morgan trying to sell their story to get an easy life for himself just showed how vulnerable they were. So, at this point, with Ellie, Alex, Kathleen and Emma's agreement (as Sarah, Casey, Carina and Zondra already had fabricated backgrounds, courtesy of their spy life, so it wouldn't be an issue for them if the details were changed, he'd mostly just tell them), he was going to have to re-write all their pasts to make it that much harder to track them down.

It did help that Morgan's knowledge of them finished ten years ago, and they'd cut all their ties with their previous lives around that time, because the majority of what he had to do was just to get in and alter old records, wipe out evidence of where they'd lived or worked up to when Morgan was pushed out of their lives, and create the evidence that showed a different life for them. Morgan's Mom and Big Mike could have been a problem, but they'd arranged for a reasonable payout for Big Mike (a reward for his years of "service") when the Buy More blew up in the "accident", and the last they'd heard they were off wandering around the country in an RV, getting freaky, so they were pretty much uncontactable. Another risk was the Woodcombs, and he had to talk to Ellie (as they were still sort of her family by marriage) before they arranged for them to be transferred to other prisons and held incommunicado, so they couldn't be located to support the stories that Morgan may have already told. Once he created the life of Lester Burton and had him arrested and incarcerated in a mental asylum for the crimes he'd done, there wouldn't be much chance of him being listened to (and that was assuming that the government held off on the chemical lobotomy that he expected that they'd order to ensure Morgan couldn't talk about the secrets he had in his head), but he had already talked to an unknown number of media people, and they had to head off any investigations that came out of what he'd said to date, which was why he'd jumped on-line in DC to wipe out all references to Morgan and close off the most obvious connections to them that Morgan would have known about. The proper operation to re-create all their lives (starting with Morgan's) would of course involve much more work.

Chuck stopped to, well, chuckle at that point, telling Sarah that he was going to have to make them both about four or five years younger, when she raised her eyebrow at him he explained that it was commonly mentioned that he'd gone to Stanford, so they couldn't change that, but if he pushed his attendance at Stanford back by four to five years, it would prevent any connections being made to people who may have known him, or Bryce, or Jill. Therefore, as there was no way that his stunning and obviously younger beautiful bride could be older than him on paper, her Harvard records and birth records would need to be pushed back as well. For that matter they'd need to do something similar with Ellie to show that she was still studying when she was supposed to be working at the hospital (and some of the long term people at the hospital who may remember her, or Devon, needed to get a windfall/retire/get a better job offer elsewhere so they weren't around and available to contradict her new life story). And he'd of course wipe out any and all records of Devon Woodcomb's medical career.

Sarah sat back, a little overwhelmed by the scope of the changes that Chuck was planning, and a little ashamed of herself that she'd thought that he was doing all this for that nasty little troll. As soon as they got home Chuck called everyone in for a meeting to fill them in on the situation and explain what his plan was, Casey and the other ex-spies just nodded (as expected) when he explained about re-creating their lives, but the civilians looked confused. Once the others had left, Chuck and Sarah sat down with Ellie, Alex, Kathleen and Emma to explain why they needed to wipe out evidence of key parts of their previous lives and re-write them so that they couldn't be tracked down. Luckily, as the baseline for Clan Carmichael was very bright, none of them had any trouble understanding why this was necessary, but the thought of wiping out their previous lives was difficult for them, so Chuck and Sarah gave them as much time as they needed and calmly answered all of their questions. After a couple of hours of discussion (and more than a few tears), they were all OK with the idea, so after a round of hugs Chuck got to work. As he'd said to Sarah (and the others), the first step was to create and insert the records of Lester, the retarded child molester, to get him picked up and away from anyone who might be inclined to listen to him (Casey took an evil pleasure in that, he still hadn't forgiven the troll for what he'd done to Alex or them, any more than Sarah had).

Once the full image of Lester Burton was created and out there, he went to work on everyone else. Ellie was the most difficult to re-create, as she was the one with the most established legitimate career, in the end Chuck primarily left her later records intact, just altering the back trails of her previous medical history and her academic and birth records, to show that she went through a number of years after she actually did, and to cover the lost years, he fast tracked her medical career due to outstanding achievements (which she would have made if she wasn't trying to juggle life, a career and looking after a brother who'd fallen in a heap when his life didn't turn out the way he expected). For the civilians in the family (and his wife) he went through all his proposals before he put them out there, for the others he just told them, for the most part anyway. Carina loved the fact that she got kicked out of university for sexual misconduct and had to pick up her education at another university, but things like that made the story more believable, especially when he got a few details from her which put her at the university in question doing those things within the proper timeframe, so if people followed that up they were likely to find someone who remembered something about it (it wasn't likely that people would forget anyone as wild and beautiful as Carina).

So Lester was found via an anonymous tip and arrested, he was beaten fairly badly in his arrest as he was arrested by long term cops who hated child molesters, but as they could see that he was retarded (as reported) they held back a little. The commitment process was fairly quick and straight forward, the story he tried to tell the judge matched everything in the medical reports that detailed the fantasy life that he was supposed to be living, so he was committed to a criminal psychiatric facility, and flagged "never to be released" due to his history of repeat offences against children whenever he got out. If he could avoid pissing off the powers that be, and they didn't decide to give him a chemical lobotomy anyway, he'd probably be living better than he had for the past ten years that he'd been on the run, hiding from Casey, Sarah and everyone else. The Woodcombs were quietly transferred and held incommunicado, and reminded that if they ever tried to talk to anyone about the Bartowskis or anything else they thought they knew, that would probably be the last thing they said. So, the situation was apparently contained, the people who could cause trouble for the Clan should be unreachable and therefore they should be able to go on with their lives, that was good, right?

**A/N: OK, we seem to have people getting upset because their little buddy is getting a rough deal again, no, I didn't like him, never did, but the scenario here is that Chuck created a situation whereby he, and the secrets in his head, could be safely contained without him having to die immediately because he'd tried to sell the story (including government secrets) for personal profit. Not being stroppy, really, I'm just having trouble understanding how people can't see the good side of that?**


	13. Mo Lester

**Usual disclaimer for the Land of Litigation, no rights to any characters portrayed.**

With their post Lester Burton life story re-imaging finished, most of Clan Carmichael had homework to do, committing their new lives to memory. For the most part it was minor details, just the shifting of a few locations or dates here and there. The biggest changes were for Ellie, because as well as her academic and medical careers and where she'd lived being shifted quite a bit, one thing she had actually asked Chuck for was to wipe out any record of her marriage to Devon, to give herself a chance to start over, seeing as she sort of had to do that anyway. They were sitting down with their parents and talking about it when Stefan burst out laughing, he looked at his wife and children looking at him as if he was off his rocker and managed (with some difficulty) to stop laughing long enough to explain himself, the point was that for most of the last nine years he'd been the one who had to learn and embrace his new life story, but now he was the only one in that family who DIDN'T have to work to get the story straight, it was a nice change for him, at least. The others looked at him for a bit and eventually joined him in the laughter, as it was funny when he put it that way.

When they'd settled down Stefan asked Chuck how the new virtual touch screen watches were working out? As he very rarely operated away from home he didn't use the mobile interfaces as much as the others did, he'd made up the prototypes when Chuck had suggested it, but wasn't sure how useful they'd be. Chuck showed him that he was wearing his at the time, and said that they were proving handy, Sarah used the virtual touch screen and a pair of the AR glasses all the time she was away from her desk. He did note that personally he'd like to increase the resolution and sensitivity, because when he was typing in other languages like kanji, the original prototype wasn't enough, if they could resolve that he'd happily use it with the AR glasses anywhere other than at home or in the office, where he could use the primary interfaces for the Castle computer, it had already replaced the phablet, but would be nice if it could provide the full keyboard capabilities that he needed. Stefan made some notes as he asked him for more detail on what he wanted and said he'd have a look into what he could get out of it, which generally meant that Chuck would have the upgraded prototype in a few days, a week at most. Before they finished Chuck asked if he could see about adding a separate virtual track ball and button interface on the other side, so the hand wearing the watch could operate that while the other hand was operating the virtual keyboard, if they got that far. A challenge like that got a big grin out of Stefan, as that would take this interface into a totally different space, now he was really motivated to get into it. Chuck grinned as well, it was handy having a mad genius inventor for a father.

They actually had about six months without any indications that BGRU was getting active again, it almost felt like a holiday for them, but as usual, something always came up, and this time it came in the form of a call from Josie in the office while Chuck and Carina were going through some things, asking if anyone knew where Jeff was? They looked at each other, and Carina asked why? When Josie answered that she had what appeared to be an unattractive Indian lesbian there demanding to see her partner, Jeffrey Barnes, they quickly brought up the office camera feeds and burst out laughing, Chuck told Josie that it wasn't a lesbian, and they had every reason to believe that Jeff's ex "partner" was actually male, while Carina went to find where Jeff was working and give him the news that Lester was back.

When Carina found Jeff, they got changed and hopped in Jeff's Porsche to head into the office. They got there just in time, as Sarah had swung through the office with Molly to pick up something and she was being accosted by Lester in the reception area, and more to the point so was Molly. Lester hadn't gotten any brighter or less disgusting in the years that he'd been away, and Sarah was ready to end him then and there after he made comments about her and Molly (and Josie) obviously being prostitutes and he was sidling closer to Molly, obviously interested in her. Carina quickly grabbed Sarah and Molly and pushed them into the office, spending about ten minutes trying to calm Sarah down enough to stop her from bursting back out through the door to kill Lester. When Chuck saw Sarah walk in with Molly on the monitors he dropped everything and jumped on the Nighthawk (Sarah had reversed her position on the Nighthawk years ago and said he could have it back, and as it had been in storage since it was returned to the NSA due to the fact that no "normal" humans had the reflexes to safely operate it a speed, the General had quietly arranged for it to be released back to them) to try and get into the office before things got dangerous, but he only managed to get there a few minutes after Carina had dragged Sarah and Molly into the inner office.

Once Chuck was there, he and Jeff bodily dragged Lester into the outer conference room and shut the door. Chuck spend a couple of minutes tying to calm down as he looked at the obnoxious creature that had just forced its way back into their lives while it rabbiting on about how they couldn't manhandle him like that, he was an important person and he'd sue them. Once he'd managed to get himself under control he told Jeff to make sure that his "partner" stayed in the room and went to see whether Sarah and Molly were OK, loudly calling to Josie to shoot anyone who tried to leave the room before he closed the door.

When he saw Sarah and talked to her, he was relieved at first that they were OK, until she told him what Lester had said and was doing. At that point he gently kissed her and told her with a tightly controlled voice that he'd be back soon, turning to go out the door. Carina frantically called out to Josie to stop him, tranq him or something, but when Josie jumped up with the pistol to tranq him he closed the distance and snatched it off her faster than she could react, tossing the pistol into the corner as he headed back into the conference room. When he entered the room Lester immediately jumped up and frantically tried to get away from him, because the man in front of him wasn't the Chuck who used to be at the Buy More, it was a primal force out to kill. When Chuck reached him his hand darted out like a striking snake and Lester found himself snatched up into the air and smashed back against the wall effortlessly, but with enough force to drive the air from his lungs and knock him half unconscious.

To Jeff's credit, even through he knew quite well what Chuck was capable of and could see how enraged he was at this point, he was brave enough to grab Chuck's arm and try to pull it down as he said that Lester wasn't worth the trouble that would come of killing him, even if he deserved it. Lester was coming to as Jeff was talking to Chuck and he heard this last, and he squeaked, terrified, only now realising that this visit could go very, very badly for him. The squeak drew Chuck's attention back to him, and the baleful gaze pinned him to the wall as surely as the arm that ended in the fist with a handful of his shirt against his chest. Chuck's voice was deceptively calm as he asked what right Lester thought he had to come into their offices and call his wife and his teenaged sister-in-law prostitutes and then try to lay his hands on his sister-in-law?

Alex was now standing at the doorway with the pistol that Chuck had taken off Josie, trying to think of a way to diffuse the situation, and Chuck's voice chilled her, because it was exactly the same as Sarah's had been the night that she had Morgan dangling against the wall (because she'd just found out about the way he'd been trying to sabotage her relationship with Chuck). One thing was clear, unless someone found a way to back the situation away from Defcon 1, there would be blood here, and in his state, trying to tranq him would probably just piss him off unless she used enough to harm him. She quickly made her way across the room and joined Jeff in trying to talk Chuck down, grabbing his other arm to get his attention. The only thing that gave them hope was the fact that Chuck hadn't attacked either of them when they grabbed him, his arms didn't budge a centimetre while they were hanging off them, but he didn't do anything directly against them, he just looked at them. Eventually they managed to get through to him enough to get him to let Lester down, and they sat him in a chair.

Chuck pointed to Jeff to talk without his eyes ever leaving Lester. Jeff started by asking Lester what he was here for? Lester couldn't look away from Chuck for more than a few seconds at a time, his gaze held him like a snake's, but he started talking when Jeff kept working to draw him out, saying that Jeff needed to come back to Jeffster, the act needed him again. At Carina's snort of derision and and flat statement that that wasn't happening he gave her a brief look of disdain (Chuck still held his attention most of the time), saying that ho's weren't there for conversation, and they should just stick to their purpose in life. That actually made Chuck smile thinly, as he could feel the figurative heat coming off Carina as she was ready to blow now, too, but his amusement was short lived as he clicked his fingers for Jeff to continue. Jeff re-iterated what Carina had said, that that wasn't happening, as he had a life here and he wasn't going anywhere. Lester actually turned to look at him then, saying that it was time for him to come back, the changes made after he left weren't working, so he had to come back to fix it. At that Jeff got rather pissed as well, pointing out that he didn't leave, he was thrown out quite publicly (by you) with considerable fanfare and playing to the media with reports that he was dragging the act down with his lack of ability, so there was no way that he was going anywhere. When Carina added that they had three kids to look after now, too, Lester looked at her in shock for a second before he looked back at Chuck.

At this point Lester made the first of his big mistakes, saying that he wouldn't need that now, anyway, they were obviously doing very well with their little "business" here, so he'd just sue them all for his treatment here. Carina asked what he meant by their little "business" (using the same inflections that Lester had)? Chuck leaned back without his eyes leaving Lester to say that Lester had decided that all the girls here, including her and Molly, were prostitutes, smiling thinly again as Carina's pressure valve went off again. Carina and Jeff jumped on that to say that he was an idiot, they were a tech company, and that he wouldn't get a cent out of them after what he'd said to Sarah and Molly. Lester waved their argument off dismissively, saying that if he couldn't get what he needed by suing them he'd go to that expose show which had posted the clip about them where he'd seen Jeffrey, they had been talking about stories of some bizarre spy background for the company, but that they'd had to drop the story because they couldn't find any solid evidence. Obviously he could make plenty of money off them by giving them the stories he knew about the spies working out of the Buy More, the secret base under the Buy More and everything else he knew about (listing several of the things that Jeff had uncovered while they worked at the Buy More). If he hadn't been smugly congratulating himself that he had it all planned out and dreaming that he would be on easy street very soon, he would have noticed that everyone in the room had narrowed their eyes at that last statement, and that Sarah was now standing just inside the door. At that moment a brass figurine flashed past Carina's and Chuck's heads (just missing them), and pulped Lester's head. They all turned to look at Sarah, and she shrugged, pointing out that he had just told them enough detail to confirm that he could expose them, and that he fully intended to do so to get money, so they didn't really have any other choice, did they?

Casey arrived just as Sarah threw the figurine and swore, but it was to late to stop anything. He had no problem with her actions, just the fact that she'd done it in their conference room and that they needed to clean it up PDQ before the bloodstains got into the carpets and everything else. He also didn't have an issue with the fact that Chuck pulled Sarah into his arms and just held her while he and Carina handled the body and did the clean-up around them, or that the others were too shocked to help either. Except for Sarah, he and Carina were by far the most experienced in this sort of thing, and Jeff had been a close friend and partner of the unlamented deceased, so it was to be expected that most of them would have issues with what happened. He was aggravated by the fact that it had come down to this, but given that he'd heard enough over the monitors to make him drop everything and rush in, he had no doubt that it would prove justified when the full story came out. They took the figurine and carefully cleaned it to remove any signs of fingerprints or DNA other than Lester's, and later used it to stage the body as a gay hate crime in a part of town where that would be quite believable.

When Casey and Carina got back to the office they all relocated to one of the internal conference rooms and everyone, except Molly, who Alex had taken home (as Josie was getting her fingers taped up after Chuck almost broke them when he wrenched the pistol off her, something he couldn't stop apologising for when he came down and realised what he'd done to her) sat down to talk it out. Basically, no-one thought it could have gone any other way once Lester started threatening to sue and then sell everything he knew about them, they couldn't afford for that happen, especially after everything they'd done to cover their trails with the recent Morgan incident. Those without an operational background were a little shaken by the way it happened, but they could see that it was inevitable, including the fact that Sarah had obviously decided to do it before Chuck made himself do it, to save him that on his conscience. The fact was that the world would be a better place without a pervert of Lester's calibre in it, and that was obvious to everyone. The fact that he decided that all the girls were hookers (the only conclusion for something of his mindset for all the beautiful women in there, and the fact that they were with Chuck and Jeff), actually said that to Sarah's face and obviously wanted to have time with Molly just proved what a sick, delusional little animal he was, and there was no way to talk him into keeping quiet as soon as he'd started seeing dollar signs. No, it was the right thing to do, even if it was a bit of a shock at the time.

**A/N: OK, never thought that this would be a necessary clarification in the space that the show was set, but the spy world where Chuck is situated is a nasty place with nasty to evil people making up most of its inhabitants. Therefore IMHO it's absolutely ridiculous to expect things to play out in this world the same they would in a Disney Princess cartoon, but it seems that many people read stories that say up front that they're dark (it's been in the description since nearly the beginning), and still get upset because they are? Really? **

**If anyone else can't work out why it was necessary, the actions Lester was threatening (and would have done) would expose them to all the organisations who were looking for them, but they didn't have any grounds to get him locked away in a government supermax (or even ordinary) prison before he had a chance to do that, so if he'd walked out of there the evil little pervert would have put them in the sights of all the "bad" organisations that they'd been putting away and possibly signed their death warrants, much like Morgan was trying to do, but Morgan had government secrets in his head, so the government would have stepped in with him.  
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**BTW: Lester wasn't an idiot in the show, he and Jeff were the only ones other than Chuck who actually showed any intelligence in the Buy More, and in fact, the show portrayed him as the brighter, leader of the pair throughout. As I hated the character's sleaziness I chose to show that this only happened because Jeff was continuously impaired due to drugs, alcohol or carbon monoxide poisoning, but that wasn't the way the show had it.**


	14. The Mighty Quinn 1

**Apparently I've been incorrectly presuming that people have been following my story and understood what the world "my" characters are living in is like, recent comments have shown that I was obviously incorrect in that presumption. Sorry about that, I'll try to make it clearer from now on what the scenario is and how things fit together and work in "my" world.**

**I guess I get frustrated when people write reviews or messages on my stories to tell me that the events that I write about are unrealistic or wrong for my story, when they haven't bothered paying attention to what the world of my stories actually is, and are in fact writing about how they don't fit into the world of their own stories. I don't write reviews to tell them that I find their stories unrealistic or silly just because they don't match my view of how things were or would have gone, I stop reading them, it'd be nice if they'd reciprocate with the same consideration.**

**For clarification, my stories are about my perception of how things were portrayed in the actual series (for the most part exactly as they were shown there), and how the story would have played out down the track after the finale in "my" world. So yes, characters that I disliked on the basis of what I saw in the series get treated accordingly, and others who showed obvious qualities that weren't allowed to come out within the time constraints of the series have been given their chance to show who they actually are.**

**Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters portrayed here.**

In the weeks following Lester's forced entry into (and abrupt exit from) their lives, there was a degree of disquiet within the family. None of them questioned that what had been done was correct, or that the world was better off without the foul little pervert, but it dredged up a lot for those who had been around in that world where Lester had had a part, none more so than Jeff. In a way, Lester had been a close "friend" and yes, partner to Jeff for a long time. He was disgusting, self serving and dismissive of any needs or desires other than his own, but he was a large part of Jeff's life for a long time, and now Jeff was spending a lot of time thinking about "What if?"s, even though he knew quite well that the biggest "What if?" was "What if Lester had been a decent person and not what he was?". Carina tried to give him space while being there when he needed her (she was trying to grow as a partner, and tried to give him what she thought he needed from her at that point), but the kids couldn't see things that way, so Charlie and the girls kept hugging him and asking what was wrong, as they could see that something obviously was.

While the kids didn't give him time to go through things the way he wanted to, in a way that was a good thing, as it prevented him from dropping into the old Jeff, and kept the best parts of his new life in his face, he had a family, a partner and kids who loved and needed him and cared enough about him to show him that, as well as the love of the rest of the extended family of Clan Carmichael and a fulfilling and exciting life through Carmichael Industries that was more than he'd ever dreamed of. That put his thoughts about Lester into perspective better than they would have been if he was just wondering about what Lester could have been, and against his current life, Lester was shown to be what he was, a self centred, conniving manipulator who had always taken everything for himself and forced Jeff, in particular, to give up everything he wanted to support Lester's plans for himself.

The very fact that he came back as soon as he found a way to locate Jeff with the intention of dragging him back into restarting Jeffster (purely to restart his own career that he had ruined when he decided that he didn't need Jeff any more and therefore tossed him aside and ridiculed him so publicly) showed that he hadn't changed at all. This was emphasised even more by the fact that he immediately jumped onto the ideas of trying to sue them when he saw that they obviously had money, and then selling them out to the expose channel the second that it looked like suing them may not work out, with absolutely no consideration of the issues that that may cause Clan Carmichael (or Jeff himself). His only thought was how to get onto the quickest path to easy street for himself, to hell with what that did to anyone else. That was, and always had been, Lester's only consideration, what was best for Lester. Jeff settled down a little when he finally came to that understanding, and hugged "his" kids, they didn't know how much a part of the solution they were, but they could see that he was better and were happy because of that.

Of course, in Clan Carmichael's world, self serving sleazebags were far from the biggest danger that they had to face, and soon enough they had a much bigger threat on the radar, when they started getting hits on Nicholas Quinn. This appeared to confirm that he had, in fact, been revived, and the patterns that were showing up appeared to indicate that he was trying to do what Riley and co had been trying, to unite the remnants of BGRU under his control. In a way this was a bigger threat than Riley and co had been, as Quinn was a bigger independent player in the intelligence community and general bad guyery, and there was also the fact that he was by himself, so there would be no infighting over control to dilute his effectiveness For that matter that could make him a better figurehead to the BGRU mindset, especially as he was even more morally challenged than most of them (with Graham that seemed to be something they looked up to). Of course, the revival process may have taken a lot from him depending on how long it took for them to get to him, but Bryce had been mostly unchanged the first time around, it was mainly personality elements that he'd lost, so if the effect on Quinn was similar to that, it may not make him less effective in the role, it may only make him that much more dangerous.

When they sat down to discuss the ramifications of Quinn's possible return and the fact that he'd almost certainly come after them, most of the family were totally confused when Sarah turned to Chuck and said that if Bo Derek came back with Quinn this time, she was going to kick her corn fed ass back to Kansas and Chuck tried to correct her, pointing out that Bo was actually a California girl, but Sarah just fixed him her icy glare on him and said "Don't care!". Casey and Alex burst out laughing, and then they had to explain that Bo Derek had worked for Quinn against them before and there had been words when Chuck asked Sarah not to damage the face that he'd had his childhood fantasies about, which set most of the others off too.

With the fun out of the way, they discussed what Quinn may be like now, and what he may be after in regard to them. Without any way of really knowing how this would go down, they automatically ramped up their security procedures to several times what they were, as Quinn almost destroyed them last time, and there was a good chance that he was more dangerous now.

With that in mind, Sarah talked to Emma about taking over Molly's driving lessons and giving her and Kathleen "special" driving lessons and training as well, because if they were going ANYWHERE without guards for the foreseeable future, she wanted to ensure that they were in the best position to look after themselves. The Clan's "civilians", Kathleen, Emma, Molly and the kids, were their weak spot, and it was something that Quinn had already exploited, using Alex to get to Casey when she was a "civilian". Therefore Sarah was drumming everything she could into their current civilians to try and keep them as safe as possible, which included taking over most of Molly's driver's ed to teach her how to effectively handle the special Odyssey's they had, and also bringing the other women up to speed on their special capabilities (not the weapons, if they needed to be deployed that would happen remotely from home, but evasive driving techniques and how to effectively handle the performance of the machines to get away from pursuit, give them an idea of what sort of fire they could take and keep going, that was all within the scope of what they needed to know if they were driving alone, because the performance capabilities of those machines meant that they could safely get away from most other vehicles on the road, especially of the ones coming after them were in SUVs or vans). Clara and Charlie also got more basic lessons on how to handle the Odysseys, in case their driver was incapacitated or prevented from getting them away, just as a last ditch option to get them and the other kids away, because the safest place for them to be when they were away from home or inside the CI offices was locked into one of the armoured vehicles. All the family's civilians also got extensive lessons on how to behave at all times away from home, such as NEVER getting into anyone other than the family's cars, how to distract or disengage from an attacker and the best places to hide to avoid detection. These were all things that they never wanted the kids to know about, but the family's threat profile just went up the moment that they knew that Quinn was possibly on the scene again, so they had to.

Quinn wasn't as easy to track down as Graham and the others had been, he was quite elusive the first time around, and he was far more so now. He spent his time bouncing around the world popping up here or there for a day or so at a time, one of the few benefits from his behaviour was that they were accumulating a map of probably BGRU remnant locations, as they could think of little reason other than chasing the remaining BGRU groups for support for him to visit most of those locations, so on every point where Quinn popped up they intensified their searches for BGRU presence. They were getting hits on all the locations with the intensified searches (which appeared to confirm that there were BGRU bases in those locations), and after 3-4 months they started getting repeats for Quinn, himself, as he was going back to see/meet with people again in his on-going campaign. It was much harder to get results than it was the first time that they tracked BGRU down, as they were all in hiding now, if they thought they were being careful under Graham, that was nothing compared to the way they were now. The BGRU guys HAD to be going crazy, hiding as deep as they were, as there had to be thousands of them out there, but in general they weren't getting more than half a dozen hits a week world wide in all their searches.

So they were ever so slowly building a map of probable current BGRU locations, they had 20-30 individuals who were obviously rebelling against the rules to stay inside, as they accounted for about a quarter of the BGRU hits that they were getting. That was a slight win, anyway, as it was making it easier to close in on the BGRU site at their locations. Another minor win was that after about seven months of this they were starting to see a pattern for Quinn's movements, the locations he was more likely to go to.

Suddenly, about fourteen months after they first started getting hits on Quinn, it looked like they were starting to make a move on Carmichael Industries, as there was a ramp up of BGRU hits around LA, including a couple of hits for Quinn himself. In a way it was a relief, they were obviously far more at risk now that BGRU was moving, but the fourteen months of always being on the defensive and looking over their shoulders had been just as bad for them as it was for BGRU, and it was wearing them thin. The only benefit was that their readiness was so much better than it had been fourteen months ago, they'd reluctantly agreed that the kids needed to be able to protect themselves as well as they could, so everyone had been training in all forms of self defence and the necessary processes constantly. All the kids would handle the Odysseys to some degree now (Jaqui and Piotr were the smallest, of course, but not that much smaller than Susie and Wendy and they were more competent than Carina's girls were), there were two more Odysseys now (Casey finally gave up the Crown Vic and Josie replaced the SUV she used with an Odyssey) and the Odysseys had all now been retrofitted with remote/autonomous driver packages, so if necessary they just needed to get them going, and then as soon as possible they could be taken over from home. Everyone knew all the protocols and processes and how to react when anything happened, it took a bit to get it through to everyone that the time had finally come that they had been preparing for (especially the kids), but they got everyone together in the bunker and brought up the images of all the BGRU people who'd been flagged around LA, to get them to memorise the faces in hope that they could recognise them if they turned up, they put special focus on Quinn as he was the biggest threat, and eventually they all got the point about how serious the situation was now.

Other key points that improved their readiness were the fact that Stefan and Ellie had managed to complete the optimised Intersect versions that allowed Chuck, Sarah and Ellie to get the maximum performance and benefit out of the Intersect. Once everything was optimised for Chuck and working well consistently, they backed it off a little and Ellie loaded it, they then optimised her version for her brain, too, before repeating the process for Sarah. This meant that they were all far and away ahead of any previous Intersect hosts, including Chuck himself with the CIA/NSA version 2.0 or 3.0 Intersects. This version pushed them a fair way beyond ordinary human capabilities in every area, so that they were the ultimate soldiers. If the test results from Graham's program were accurate, Chuck and Sarah's kids were going to be able to exceed them when they were ready, but even if Ellie had been prepared to contemplate loading the Intersect into their kids (she wasn't), Chuck and Sarah weren't prepared to consider it until after they were teenagers, to give them and their brains a chance to develop properly before they tried anything like that.

While Chuck, Sarah and Ellie were the only Bartowski Intersect hosts for at least the next decade, the kids and everyone else were trained on and were using the new generation of the mobile nodes for the targeting systems etc (as well as the pseudo intersect data capabilities and communications). Stefan had enhanced the virtual touch screen/track ball interface watches to bring them up to the level that Chuck had been after, and had also enhanced the Augmented Reality glasses to that they could support independent 1K video displays and audio. The brain makeup of about half of the family couldn't support proper simultaneous usage of the independent displays, that appeared to be only a Bartowski trait (which included Sarah and Mary actually), but Chuck and their kids could quite easily separate the vision and motor control to use the camera feeds for two pistols/weapons simultaneously, as could Sarah and Ellie, and Charlie, Stefan, Mary, and Clara could do it to a degree. Ellie obviously didn't like using the weapons or using the other fighting skills, but she had accepted the need to step up when she had the discussion with Carina about what she had to do to protect her daughter after she was told Graham's plans for Clara, and had applied herself to learning and mastering anything and everything that came under those requirements. Given that she had the same latent capabilities as Chuck (as the result of the same breeding experiment), she mastered all aspects easily, especially with the Intersect boost.

So the fact that they had BGRU coming after them yet again, probably being led by someone who may have been worse than Graham as far as his practices went was bad, but the family was prepared to take on a force at least several times their size, and the Intersect hosts could feasibly take on fifty to one odds without too much trouble, so they were as ready as they could be.

They didn't want to go to war, but if it came to them they'd deal with it.


	15. The Mighty Quinn 2

**Usual disclaimer for the Land of Litigation, no rights to any characters portrayed.**

While the constant vigilance was wearing on them, Clan Carmichael were feeling a little more secure as they were fairly confident that they were ready to face what they thought was coming, at least they were until Stefan pulled his stunt. One of the most promising side effects of the Bartowski Intersect was the vitality that the hosts acquired, and the fact that their general physiological state was steadily improving the longer they had it. They were fitter, stronger, faster and better co-ordinated all the time (not only when they were accessing the Intersect) and actually appeared to be getting younger. There appeared to be something in the make-up of the new Intersect that hooked into the body's physiology with some low level interfaces and, well, initiated a reboot on the degrading processes in the body to turn back the ageing process, and force an overall improvement.

Given the magnitude of what they were facing, Stefan decided that it was worth the risk to see whether he could tap into that for people other than the optimal Intersect hosts like his children and Sarah, and as he'd managed to survive with an earlier version of the Intersect, chose to use himself as a guinea pig. Therefore, without telling anyone else he reworked the Bartowski Intersect structure to form a "Bartowski Lite Intersect", removing most of the data storage and access functions that put the heavy dependence on the brain's data retention capabilities and mainly forming it around the motor control functionality (much like Manoosh's Intersect glasses had) as he believed that the revitalisation would be linked to that side, and once he'd tested and debugged the changes to the Intersect code, loaded it into himself one night. He understood what a risk he was taking, but who knew better than Stephen Bartowski (no matter what name and face he was wearing now) how to build intersect versions to achieve a given purpose? No-one other than him had ever made any notable achievements in the Intersect space, yes, he'd needed Eleanor's help to fix the brain interface issues that related to human neurology, rather than the technology that he knew so well, but he wasn't touching the elements that his daughter had contributed so much to fixing, he was just cutting down the size of the code to reduce the impact and load on the host's brain.

The code wasn't 100%, and he was having some issues, but it generally worked, so when he was still alive and sane and feeling better after a couple of weeks, he told Chuck and Ellie what he'd done. After berating him soundly for being so stupid, they worked with him to resolve the issues and optimise it for his brain, much like they'd done for the full version that they both carried. It only took a few more weeks to get his version to the point where he wasn't experiencing any detrimental side effects and he was getting almost as much of a boost from it as the others were, at which point they clued Mary in on what he'd done (Chuck had of course told Sarah immediately and she'd gone to Stefan straight away to abuse him for risking himself that way).

They didn't suggest anything to Mary but she could see the same potential and need that Stefan had, so she wanted to load the lite version too. Sarah and her children did try to talk her out of it, because there was no testing of long term affects as yet, and they weren't comfortable that it was totally safe, but Chuck and Ellie's stubborn streaks came more from her than from their father, and she wasn't budging, so they followed much the same process as they'd done with the full version, backed it off a little, loaded it into her and spent the next week or so optimising it for her brain. Mary had a similar genetic make-up to Stefan and similar intelligence and data retention levels, but she hadn't had an intersect in her brain before so, much like Ellie had found, the immediate affects were rather more pronounced on her than they were on Stefan, which added to her children's and Sarah's concerns. After a couple of weeks, though, the side effects seemed to be dissipating and she was beginning to show the benefits of the revitalisation effects.

At this stage, they still hadn't told anyone else about what Stefan (and now Mary) had done, but the others were beginning to notice, for a start both their proficiencies in all aspects of the defence/operational practices had jumped remarkably, and that was hard to cover up, but they were also starting to show the revitalisation and boosting effects of the Intersect, so when the others started asking questions, they all sat down to discuss Stefan's stunt. Obviously the others were interested, but no-one was downplaying the potential danger of the process, the first step was to get all the testing done for everyone (initially they were only going to do it with those who were interested, but then it was decided that it would be better to test everyone a) to get a better baseline for the group, and b) in case the others decided at a later stage that they were interested), to see what the probability was for the process to be safe for them. This wasn't an exact science, but the genetic markers and data retention levels appeared to be a common element among those who it was successful for, so they looked for these elements first. Not surprisingly (given that the gene markers that they were looking for came from Scandinavian bloodlines), Carina was the next most obvious candidate for the process, so they went through the loading and optimisation process with her as she'd been eager to do it.

What was surprising was who, according to the numbers, the next best candidate after Carina was, but Jeff's red hair should have been a give-away as to his Scandinavian blood. He had little hesitation in jumping into the process, too, so it was initiated for him. Next came Josie (once again, her mother's red hair was a clue), and she jumped in as well. The others were more marginal, and Chuck and Sarah tried to talk them out of it, as there was no way of gauging the risks if there was an adverse reaction to loading the Intersect. The Bartowski versions were obviously safer than any previous Intersects, but Chuck, Sarah, Casey and Stefan were all too aware of what happened to people when they were overloaded by the Intersects, images of the brain dead victims and recipients of the Fulcrum Intersect attempts were seared into Chuck, Sarah and Casey's brains, and Stefan had seen as well as them what the affects of the Ring Intersect were (less catastrophic but still far from promising).

Therefore it was surprising that Casey overruled their objections and went with the process, he knew the risks as well as anyone, and knew that they really needed him to face what they had coming, but what the others didn't really know was how much the effects of the damage to his body were still holding him back, if there was a reasonable chance or overcoming that, he was prepared to take those odds (and there was another element that Chuck and Sarah did understand, if it worked for Casey, then the likelihood that it would be safe for Alex was pretty good, and Casey was quite prepared to be the test case if it made his daughter safer).

While Carina, Jeff, Josie and Casey were going through the acclimatisation and optimisation processes, they managed to get the others to hold off until they had a better idea of how the first batch were handling it. The one who was pushing for it who was probably most at risk was Zondra, she had no significant indicators of the genetic markers that they'd come to believe were key to success with the Intersect, even though her data retention was good (if not great), so there was a significant degree of risk there and they didn't want to take the chance of losing her. Her native ability meant that she was very good as she was, trying for enhancement via the Intersect was only sensible if there was a reasonable chance of success, and it didn't look like there was in this case.

Carina, Jeff, Josie and Casey had varying experiences with the acclimatisation process, as expected, it was easiest for Carina, and worst for Casey, but Josie didn't have much worse a time than Carina and Jeff didn't have much better a time than Casey, and they all assimilated the Intersect properly within a few weeks and started improving. That brought them to the decision process for Alex, Heather (she WAS part of the Clan now, she'd proven herself time and time again, just as they'd proved to her that they were the only ones looking out for her), Kathleen, Emma and Zondra, and with Zondra overriding all their objections to her loading the Intersect, it was unanimous.

Chuck, Sarah and Casey were surprised (to say the least) that Kathleen and Emma insisted on going ahead with it as well, they were the family's "senior civilians", no-one wanted them to be part of the fighting at all, and no-one have ever thought that they'd consider it, so they hadn't even been asked about it. They'd been talking between themselves , however, and had come to the decision that if the process was safe, they'd take it to improve the family's chances of getting through what was ahead of them. Like Ellie, they really didn't want to have anything to do with the fighting, but they believed that it was their duty to step up and do their part in protecting the kids and the family, and the only way that they could be effective at that was to have the Intersect. When it proved impossible to talk them out of it, and given that all the markers and test results showed that they had as good a chance as Casey or the others of being OK, everything was set up for them to load the Bartowski Lite Intersect.

Given the concerns that they had for Zondra, Stefan and Ellie stripped the version that was loaded into her back much further than the ones that had been used so far, in hope that that would minimise the impact on her. They loaded that version into her and monitored her closely, at first keeping any optimisation to the elements that made it sit better in her. As she became acclimatised to it and more comfortable, they slowly re-added the elements that had been removed so that she could be eased into it. As a result of this process, it took over a month (almost twice the time it did with the others) for her to get up to the "full" version of what was loaded for her, but given that it reduced the risk and impact as she was being brought up to speed, they decided to follow the same process (if maybe a little bit quicker) with the others.

Therefore, the starting version that was used for Zondra was loaded into the other four a week and a half after Zondra got it, and they were ramped up over the next few weeks, so that they were properly acclimatised with versions that were optimised for their brains within a month. Around the same time Zondra became fully acclimatised to her version as well.

With all the Clan's adults settled into carrying some version of the Bartowski Intersect, testing and practice to consolidate their capabilities stepped up, only Chuck, Sarah and Ellie carried the full versions, but that wasn't a big differential when it came to fighting, what the significant differential was was each individual's capability to make use of the Intersect, Chuck, Sarah and Ellie were obviously the ones with the best Intersect interaction, after them came Mary, Carina, Stefan and Josie, after them Casey, Jeff, Alex, and Heather, and the ones who had received the least benefit were Zondra, Kathleen and Emma. But of course that didn't factor in the people's native ability, so Casey and Zondra were still more capable than Stefan and Josie, and Jeff was only a little better than Kathleen or Emma. Overall, that still meant that Chuck, Sarah and Ellie could handle fifty to one odds or better generally, Mary, Carina, Casey and Zondra (and possibly Heather) could manage probably thirty to one, Josie, Alex and Stefan could manage twenty to one, and Jeff, Kathleen and Emma could still handle ten to one odds. On top of that, their kids being who they were, Molly, Susie and Wendy could all hold their own against a capable operative or soldier, and the Bartowski kids could probably handle rather more than that, so in the space of a few months, their position was greatly improved, it was probable now that the other side could throw a force of hundreds against them and they'd be able to hold out.

One thing that was hard for Josie was that they'd asked her not to tell her parents about the new Intersect that Stefan and Ellie had developed, and especially not that she (along with the rest of them) was carrying a version of it now. She understood that it wasn't that they didn't trust them, but more that they didn't trust everyone around them, and therefore wanted to hold off until they were at Castle Carmichael in a secure environment before discussing it. So at this point they were hoping that there'd be birthday party or something to get them there before everything hit the fan with BGRU (as it would obviously come out then).

In the mean time, the revitalising process and the boost to strength, speed, co-ordination and endurance was progressing in all of them to varying degrees. One thing that was showing up in Casey and Mary was that debilitating injuries that they'd accumulated in a lifetime of action were already having notably reduced affects on them. This was something that Stefan, Ellie, Chuck and Sarah had been hoping since they noticed the apparent rejuvenating properties of this new Intersect's affect on the body, but it was nice to see that their theory on that had been borne out. Mind you, this also reinforced the decision to keep all of the kids well away from the intersect until they were out of their teens, at least, because the way it interacted with the body's processes was obviously far more profound than they'd initially imagined.

There was another item that Stefan, Ellie, Chuck and Sarah kept from the others, given that it was so dangerous to the family (as it would be something that government and other organisations would do just about anything to get their hands on), Stefan and Ellie had managed to come up with a method to extract (but not delete) the contents of Intersect databases from the Intersect hosts' heads. This was how they built the skills and other databases that were being loaded into everyone, they extracted the contents of the databases that Chuck and Sarah (and Stefan) had in their heads, and selectively combined, compiled and reformatted them into something which would work seamlessly with the Bartowski Intersect. Even though the extraction method didn't delete the existing Intersect Databases, they created a variation of this which located any Intersect Database and Software patterns (much as the copying mechanism did for the databases), and then wiped the entire structure out of the brain. When they ran this mechanism on Chuck's head he was out for over 24 hours, as he had 15 years of multiple Intersect versions and numerous Intersect updates (all of which were written to new areas of the brain) that needed to be cleaned out before they loaded the Bartowski Intersect. Sarah and Ellie were panicking when he didn't come to, and Sarah sat by his side the entire time until he woke. Stefan recovered in less than an hour when he got his head cleaned out, and Sarah only took about 15 minutes to recover. Chuck got the full version of the new Intersect Database (other than known false data and duplicates which had been excised) with the considerable extensions that they'd added from their own research over the past ten years, the database that Sarah and Ellie got was reduced by about 25% to avoid creating undue loads on the brain (Chuck's head had been crammed with multiple Intersect versions and databases for the past sixteen years or so, so he could handle it, they didn't want to overload the newer Intersect hosts up front), the version that Mary and Stefan got was only about 50% of the full database, as they inherently had less capacity than their children (or Sarah), and weren't utilising the data access mechanisms of the Intersect, so they essentially just had skills databases for the motor control functionality. The Intersect database that the others received was based on the one that Stefan and Mary got, but anything that they'd already mastered, or was unlikely to be useful to them was removed, once again to reduce the load, so Zondra, Kathleen and Emma only carried around 30% of the size of the database in Chuck's head. Of course, any of them could have the database updated to add skills or data if needed, given that the longer they had and used the Intersect, the less affect an upgrade would be likely to have on them. For that matter, it would be feasible to update the "Lite" version of the Intersect to the "Full" version down the track if it was required and the person could handle it OK. Basically, the Bartowski Intersect had come back to the original intent for the Intersect, to be a teaching tool to add skills for people, even though the majority of the skills loaded were most definitely not what was originally intended.

While the new Intersect versions were being loaded and bedded in for everyone, they were keeping up a high state of alert as they kept scanning for any information about BGRU activity and Quinn, especially around LA. It was apparent that BGRU was gathering a force in the area as they were getting more hits locally, not a lot, but a lot in comparison to what they'd been seeing from them over the past eighteen months, and they weren't getting any hits elsewhere on Quinn, so it looked like he was still in the area, too. If BGRU was carrying out any active surveillance on Clan Carmichael, they were obviously better at it than they used to be, as they'd been watching for that and hadn't seen anything. Luckily there were a few of the party rebels in the crew that had been brought in, so they were getting hits on them to give an indication of where BGRU was collecting, and a little bit of an idea of what their movements were.

Given that they now had some indication of where BGRU was collecting, Chuck and Stefan knuckled down to search real estate and utility records for those areas, trying to identify the specific location(s) that they were using. It was too risky to have any of them out there, so they kept to satellite imagery, security camera hacks and the searches they were doing to try and find the sites. They did finally track down an Internet portal at one of the sites and Chuck put his Piranha hat on to do his magic, quickly copying everything he could find and scrubbing any evidence of his visit before removing the hacks he'd used to get through the portal. Once again, they were using multiple levels of encryption on the files (they hadn't gotten any less paranoid after the first purge, unfortunately), and it took Chuck and Stefan almost a week to crack the encryption. They didn't find as much useful information as they'd like in the files that Chuck got, but they did get some interesting routing tables and logs in the system files what showed a fair bit of promise to track down some of the BGRU locations around the world, so Chuck got Jeff working on those, as that sort of thing was right up Jeff's alley.

While there were references to the operation that was being mounted against CI, it appeared that Quinn and the others running the operation were playing their cards close to the chest and not recording too many details. There was an indication that they had been holding off on any attempts of surveillance on CI to prevent being identified before they were ready to make their move, and that they only knew of the location of the CI office (which tied into Riley and co's MO). There was enough in the notes, however, to show that they were bringing people in one at a time by various types of transport (commercial flights, small planes, trains, cars, ships) to keep them off the radar, and that process was taking a lot longer than they'd planned or liked. They were also having a lot of trouble acquiring and bringing in the vehicles, weapons and equipment that they needed for the operation, and the funds to cover the operation were drying up far faster than they'd like, too. That last struck Chuck as something he could use, so he started a series of events that resulted in the charges for a number of their locations to go up in a very short time (simple enough to buy the buildings and tell the tenants that the costs were going up) to push them down the path to consolidate to one or two buildings, which would make it a lot easier to mount a strike against them. He also started a number of deals to try to ensure that the vehicles, weapons and equipment that they were getting were doctored and likely to fail. The last big step was to initiate a series of seemingly unconnected events that led to many of the known personnel coming in to be diverted, held up or detained, to cut the manpower that they had available in LA (the main problem with this last one was making arrangements to get them picked up and dealt with before they could get away).

He was quite aware that he wasn't playing fair, but when an organisation of nefarious low lifes are coming after you and your family, only an idiot would hold off on stacking the deck against them. In the midst of this he took the MiniStar to DC to meet with the General and get her to start organising for a few trusted strike teams to be available in LA on a date that was coming up, as Quinn and his council were supposed to be meeting in LA on that day. It was expected that they'd be meeting at one of the locations that they had left by then, but if not they'd interrogate the people that they found until they got the location out of them. The General looked at him when he calmly added that last and he grimly shook his head, saying that he didn't want to do that, but these people were still coming after them as a symbol of what had taken down so many organisations on their side of the fence. If they weren't prepared to stop coming after the family, well the family would go after them and stop them. The General nodded, the casual statement had given her pause, but the look in his eye when he clarified his position told her that, inside, he was still the man who had caused her so much aggravation when he'd worked for her as he'd always try to find a non-violent, and certainly non-lethal solution to the situations they were in, and she usually had to be the one to explain to the higher ups why the operations hadn't gone as planned. As he was leaving he came around to hug her goodbye (NOT a common occurrence in her office) and as he was doing so he whispered in her ear to find a way for her and Roan to come down to Castle Carmichael for at least a week once this current situation was dealt with. She looked at him and he smiled, saying that it could all be a flash in the pan. At "flash" her eyes widened and he nodded, then gave her another squeeze and sauntered out of her office.

When he got home he tracked down Josie and told her that he'd asked her parents to come down for a week or so when they had a chance, and asked her to contact them and organise a way to get the genetic marker and data retention tests done for them, perhaps spin something about tests she was having done which needed her parents' information to be accurate. She looked at him and asked him why (she looked so much like her mother when she did that) and he countered by asking her how she felt. When she replied "great" he asked what the results of her last check-up were, she narrowed her eyes at him as she said that she was healthier than she'd ever been in her life, wondering where he was going with this. Chuck was uncharacteristically serious when he nodded and said "exactly" going on to point out that they were ALL in that position now, this latest Intersect version was rejuvenating their bodies and they were all in better shape than they'd been in ages (as well as stronger, faster etc), then looked at her and asked wouldn't she like her parents to be in the same boat? That was when she realised what he was saying. He explained that Stefan was working on a DMI (De-Militarised Intersect) version which primarily activated the "body repair interface", with a few mechanisms that would be useful for self protection and other functions, and that should be able to be implemented in less than a week if they wanted it. He also pointed out that this wasn't just for them, Kathleen and Emma had indicated that they'd prefer to be rolled back to a version like that as soon as possible, as they didn't want to be warriors, and Ellie, Stefan and Jeff had also indicated similar wishes, as soon as the main danger was past, they all wanted to be downgraded.

After talking to Josie about getting things organised for her parents to be ready for the DMI, Chuck went down into the bunker for a change of pace, IE to see Stefan and the others about the new toy that Casey had asked Stefan to come up with for him. With the probability of an impending battle, Casey was worried and wanted more firepower. One day when they were in the lab, Stefan had been working on one of the weapons modules that they used in the Odysseys, SUVs, S-97s and planes (and on turrets on the house roofs) and when Casey saw it, he knew that it was what he'd been after, the weapons modules had a railgun with a five round cylinder on the rear and a pair of Support Weapon versions of the CI assault rifles, these were 1.2M long with a pair of axial magazines each, so each one carried about three times the ammunition that an assault rifle did. What Casey had asked of Stefan was for him to modify the weapons module into a portable Squad Support Weapon that could be carried and used individually, so this was the demonstration of what Stefan had come up with. The SSW had a much larger cylinder for the air supply, slung under the railgun, there was also a halfpipe shaped batteries that wrapped over the top of the weapon, the standard assault rifle pistol grip and an integrated bipod. As it would only ever be fired via the AR targeting interface, it was not a shoulder fired weapon, it was either fired from the hip or off the bipod. At 1.35M long and hefty, it wasn't a nimble weapon, but this test was to see whether it was handy enough for Casey or Chuck (or Sarah, Carina, Zondra, Mary, Josie, Heather or Alex) to use in the field. Casey put it through its paces first and he loved it, it was a hand held weapon of mass destruction, five rounds of 50mm artillery and over a thousand rounds of 10mm rifle ammo with incredible hitting power and accuracy. Chuck was next up and while not quite as enthused about the killing power as Casey, agreed that it was quite usable and effective, the girls all tried it and agreed that it was up to the job, it was a bit hefty and unwieldy for them to carry (especially Mary, Josie and Alex), but they could get it into position by themselves and once it was in position they were as enthusiastic as Casey with its effectiveness. Once it had the seal of approval Stefan got the request to build at least a dozen ASAP, and that would be at least tripled as soon as he had the time, so they that they could have them in the gun cabinets in the houses and in the vehicles for when they were needed.

Anyway, they had things headed towards a confrontation, they were assured that they'd have the strike teams they needed on site on the day, and most other elements were in place, now they just needed to make sure that Quinn and all the other major players were there when they struck, and that none of them got away.


	16. The Mighty Quinn 3

**For the children who having been paying attention, I'll explain (again) what the Intersect is in "my" world (and what it was explained to be in the series that some of us watched). To everyone else, sorry, but it shouldn't be more than two or three paragraphs.**

**Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters portrayed, yada, yada.**

There was a bit of a panic in the family when they suddenly realised that they'd almost missed making the arrangements for Clara's fourteenth birthday party with everything else that was going on, so they all leapt into action to get everything done in time (under directions from General Ellie of course) luckily Ellie had over a quarter century of party planning under her belt and she was on top of it. This also gave them the reason they needed to bring Auntie Diane and Uncle Roan down for a private chat, so that worked out well, they just sent one of the SonicStars to DC to pick them up.

When the day of the party came, Charlie and his brothers did what all good men do in those circumstances, they ran away and hid from the mob of teenaged girls that took over Castle Carmichael. Other than the boys' hasty retreat, the party went well, and it was great to have some sort of normality in their lives after all the stress that they'd been under for the past year and a half at least. When the other guests had left, Chuck, Sarah, Stefan, Ellie, Casey and Josie took Diane and Roan down to the bunker for their talk.

Chuck started by explaining that Stefan and Ellie had developed the new "Bartowski Intersect" and that everyone except for the kids had a version of that loaded now, and they were all doing well. He went on to talk about the benefits that they'd found with the new intersect but Roan apologised and asked how something that was supposed to be a database of intelligence information could do any of these things, so Chuck went back to explain (with "help" from Stefan and Ellie whenever they felt the need to correct anything he told Roan) what the Intersect, and especially this version, actually was. First he clarified the concept that it was a computer that resided and operated in the host's brain, rather than in a piece of hardware like a normal computer, and that meant that it was made up of the "software" and interfaces that actually did things, and the data that the software used to make up the instructions, this wasn't fundamentally different from any other computer. He also explained that yes, the first versions of the Intersect had been primarily an intelligence data storage/data mining tool, but they'd introduced the action element in the 2.0 version, and this fed motor control commands to the body so that the stored functions (martial arts, weapons and firearm techniques or whatever) could be performed by the host, even when the host had no knowledge of how to do those things outside of the Intersect. Here he held up a finger and said that that was the key to the changes that they were getting now, as to do that, the Intersect "software" had to have an interface to the body's control systems in order to send the commands for the body to perform these functions.

He then got onto the "Bartowski Intersect", explaining (with a lot of "assistance" from Stefan and Ellie) how they'd relied on Ellie's Neurology expertise to rework all the interfaces between the Intersect and the brain and the body's control systems to allow it to operate in a more natural and efficient manner, so that everything felt a lot more natural, and worked faster and more effectively (At that point he gave a wry grin and said "Believe me, it's a hell of a difference.", Roan looked at him in confusion, so Diane told him that Chuck had had versions of the Intersect in his head for the past sixteen years or so. He'd been the only person in the world hosting the Intersect most of that time and no-one else had ever been able to handle the Intersect the way that he could. That, of course, just made Roan stare at Chuck in shock. And with that, Chuck went back to his explanation.) What they didn't realise at first was that the differences that Ellie implemented to the way that the Intersect interfaced with the body's control systems meant that the interfaces were at a much lower level than the previous intersect versions had used, so as well as being more natural and far faster (as they didn't have to negotiate through all sorts of higher functions and logic processes to send the commands, they essentially plugged directly into the core body control system), they apparently triggered the body's repair mechanisms at that low level. Here he stopped and asked what Roan knew about legitimate reports of faith healing? Roan just said "Not much Charles." and Diane unconsciously shook her head, as she had been into new territory for most of Chuck's explanation, too. She'd only paid attention to what she was being told about the Intersect working, or not working, for most of the time that she'd commanded the team, so she was only now coming to understand how it actually worked and was hanging every word.

With their responses he went on, bringing up news reports (and some scientific reports) on how on many occasions people had apparently managed to defy scientific and medical "truths" to overcome debilitating or life threatening conditions. This was normally referred to "faith healing" or "miracle cures", but in fact it was triggering the body's innate ability to heal itself. The body still held the core ability of lower life forms to regrow or repair just about any part of itself, it was (by his theory, at least) the "higher functions" of the brain that got in the way of the body doing this, and that was what he believed was happening when the Bartowski Intersect interfaced into the body's control systems at such a low level and triggered the body's repair mechanisms to rejuvenate the body. He looked at Ellie then to, essentially, ask her opinion on this (as he hadn't run this past anyone, he was making up as he went) and she slowly nodded, deep in thought, saying that it made sense from everything she knew. Then he went on to explain the affects on speed, strength, flexibility, fitness etc that they were all seeing and feeling, and got Casey to explain the significant differences that he and Mary were feeling in regard to the previous damage they had to their bodies from the lives they'd led. Once the show and tell was done he told them that they had no idea of what the long term affects of this Intersect would be, they may well burn out within five to ten years, they didn't think that that was likely but it was certainly possible as obviously no testing could have been conducted as yet. With that, he asked them whether they'd like to take the chance on this, telling them about the DNI version that Stefan had put together, which was primarily based on the core interfaces with some basic self defence and other functions loaded into it (though additional functions could be loaded if required, the shell was there, just not the functions to act on it). They looked at each other for a few seconds before looking back at Chuck to say "Yes!" together, so they organised for them to take the tests while they were there. There was little doubt that they would be viable, given that their daughter was a strong candidate, but they still needed to know the probability of whether it was safe before proceeding.

After they cleaned up the disaster zone that Castle Carmichael became in the party and sent Diane and Roan back to DC on the SonicStar, they went back to investigating BGRU and Quinn's current exercise. They were now seeing some hits on movement from the BGRU locations that Quinn had been visiting most often, to LA, which implied that the "elders" or council meeting that they'd found out about was still on track. With the seniority of the ones coming to the meeting, they were being even more cautious than they had been with the rank and file soldiers or operatives that they were bringing in for the attack against Carmichael Industries, so there was no more than one a week who was moving, and they were taking circuitous routes to get there. Of course, they all travelled with protective details, so that made it easier to identify and track them (if they'd gone under the radar, alone, it would have been easy to lose them). This also meant that they could identify most of the upper echelon of what was left of BGRU given that they were coming together for the meeting where Quinn wanted to demonstrate his credentials for leadership by wiping out the biggest danger to their organisation, Carmichael Industries. With the cautious approach they were taking, it should take at least two months for all the "elders" to gather in LA for their meeting (which also fit into the dates that they'd seen), which gave CI nearly that long to get organised. As with the initial investigation into and purge of BGRU, CI had suspended taking on any new work until they got this out of the way, so that they could concentrate on the BGRU remnants. Therefore, they were all working full time on chasing and analysing any and all intel they could get on BGRU and the key individuals in play at the moment.

Half of the family were getting confused and concerned about the look of palpable hate that came across Sarah's face whenever Quinn's image came up on the displays, so eventually Casey quietly took them into one of the conference rooms to explain that it was Quinn who'd used the Intersect to torture her and wipe out her memories of her life with Chuck and all of them, then used her confused state and a fabricated case file to send her back in to steal the Intersect glasses and kill Chuck, and anyone else who got in her way. She'd been fighting it, but what he was telling her all the time via the files and the earpiece that he was using to communicate with her through actually fitted into her life before she met Chuck far better than her actual life over that period did, so with the constant prompting from Quinn (he was a master of manipulating the situation to match his story and could think fast on his feet, so whenever she was faced with something that didn't match what he was telling her, he'd quickly give her an explanation that the Pre-Chuck Sarah could relate to), she almost killed Chuck a couple of times, and a few others as well, but eventually when he was facing her in the house that they were going to buy and she was about to shoot him, she saw their names carved there and remembered when they, she, carved them, so she couldn't kill him then (though he almost died anyway as he'd leapt in front of her and took the bullet when Quinn tried to shoot her).

Anyway, she got enough evidence from various sources to accept that what Chuck was telling her about their life together was true, but what Quinn had done to her head via the Intersect had separated all her feelings from the memories, so while she could remember some events from their life together, and was experiencing some confusing feelings when she was with Chuck, she couldn't really feel the love that they'd had together, so she left to find Quinn and kill him for destroying her life. After a while she came back to get Chuck's help in tracking Quinn down, and he'd convinced her to let him go with her to help her, so they chased Quinn to Europe but he got away because Chuck didn't shoot him (no, he shot my helicopter with my own damn gun instead) and then they were hauled back to Burbank and locked up. After they got back to Burbank they had another chance at Quinn because he came back recover a component that he needed for the Intersect glasses from the General (nodding to Josie), but when they cornered him on the roof of the Concert Hall Sarah was stuck in the old protocols and shot him when he pulled his gun, which meant that Chuck then had to use the Intersect glasses to load the intersect in order to disarm the bomb that Quinn had planted in the Concert Hall that was full of thousands of people. After that was finished Sarah left again, they thought for good, but Chuck managed to track her down at their beach and somehow convinced her to let him help her find her way back.

And that was why Sarah hated Quinn so much, he'd deliberately destroyed her and Chuck's lives to get the Intersect glasses because he believed that he'd been cheated out of the Intersect when Larkin sent the Intersect to Chuck, and that it was meant to be him who had the Intersect. At that point Casey said that they'd have to Alex about how Sarah found her way back, because he'd left after the Concert Hall and abandoned them. "No you didn't!" came adamantly over the conference room speakers. Emma looked up at the security camera with a faux stern expression and said "Young lady, I know that you were taught that eavesdropping is not proper behaviour, have you forgotten all your manners since you left home?" The answer was "Sorry Mom, I just happened to see you lot in there and was listening to see whether Casey was going to tell you bullshit, like he just did. He left to follow his own life after he'd helped us at the Concert Hall (against orders), and after that he was honouring commitments he made with.. in Europe (when she realised that Kathleen was sitting there too), he didn't abandon us, it was me who abandoned the family. The only thing that could, did, save me was the fact that Chuck refused to give up on me no matter how much I pushed him away, just like he has for our entire life together over the past sixteen years." After that they could only hear her sobbing and Emma looked at Casey with a question in her eye, he pointed and mouthed "control room", she nodded and squeezed his arm in thanks as she passed him, going to comfort her daughter.

By then they had over a hundred BGRU names that they had identified in LA, not including the dozen "elders" who were on their way, or already in LA. The hundred or so names that they did have were probably about half of the manpower that they had there, and almost certainly only a fraction of what Quinn had planned to use in the operation against CI, but they'd been pushing Quinn into a corner, so when the day came he'd move with whatever he had on hand. They were intercepting snippets of communications that showed that Quinn and the others on site were getting a bit desperate, as they could see that things weren't going to plan (though so far there was no indication that they'd twigged that they were being manipulated into the situation that they were in, so it appeared that Chuck's plans, at least, were panning out the way he wanted, and they thought that things weren't going their way due to a string of unrelated events).

Part of the problem for Quinn and co was the fact that they'd shut down the CI offices and moved their non-armoured vehicles into the CI secure parking facility (except Sarah's Shooting Brake, she wasn't being separated from that), to give them room to bring the armoured (and armed) SUVs stored there out to Castle Carmichael, so now they had the eight Odysseys, eight SUVs and Sarah's Shooting Brake at Castle Carmichael, that was plenty of secure transportation for the family, plus the fifty strong strike team they currently had housed in the bunkers. Given that they did this all before Quinn and co decided that it was safe to commence active monitoring of the CI offices (a few weeks before the planned meeting), BGRU was suddenly running around in a panic because the targets that the whole operation were based on had, effectively, disappeared.

At this point Chuck, Sarah, Casey and some of the others who were known as CI (mostly Mary and Carina) started popping up and disappearing again in other parts of LA, well away from Castle Carmichael and the office, to draw Quinn's people in that direction. They had acquired a couple of commercial buildings and a few houses over that way and would be making it appear that they were in fact located there, but it wouldn't do to make it too easy to find them after they were ghosts, so they'd just let themselves be followed a bit at a time before they lost their tails. Let them think that they were homing in on them, but make them work for it so it was more believable. It was actually fun to play with Quinn's people this way, let them think they had the upper hand and then just disappear, only to turn up in front of them as they were frantically searching. The fact that they kept changing cars was also putting Quinn's people off their game, and convinced them that CI was trying hard to keep under wraps.

So they played the shell game with them for a few weeks, letting them find one of the buildings and a couple of the houses, taking out a few of the teams following them to make it look like they were seriously trying to keep their location a secret. All the while the team kept running the searches to nail down the location of the BGRU people and the movements of the "elders", they had the nearly all the BGRU personnel (around one hundred and sixty) and all twelve of the "elders" confirmed for one building, they'd identified optimal sniper/support positions and would have Alex and Josie up there as snipers with a two SSWs and a strike team support person each (the two SSWs were so that they could switch and have the support guy reload the thumper's ammo and replace the batteries if they used more than five rounds of 50mm, as the thumper rounds would be used to breach the building and create access for the sniper hits). Stefan and Jeff would be feeding security camera footage with precise position and angle data to their targeting systems so that they'd be able to see into the building to shoot, as well as doing the other technical support functions from the safe room back under Castle Carmichael, and Kathleen and Emma and all the kids were in there too.

That left eight of the CI people (including Ellie) and forty eight strike team members to go in and take the building, all the BGRU people and especially the dozen "elders", and their prime focus of course would be Quinn himself. The inside team would split into four, Chuck and Carina, Mary and Ellie, Sarah and Zondra, and Casey and Heather, each pair would be backed up by a dozen strike team members. The plan was to sweep through the building as quietly as possible, cleaning out the smaller fish as they went. Chuck, Sarah and Ellie should be able to recognise anyone who was worth holding for questioning, they'd be secured and everyone else would be eliminated. Casey and Heather were the only team that didn't have someone with a full Intersect, so they'd have to rely on memory and the image recognition software running on their mobile nodes (the cameras on their AR glasses were always feeding video to the computer), and the area they had was also the least likely for high value targets. Chuck and Sarah's teams' objectives was the "council" meeting, they swung in from opposite directions, taking down any BGRU personnel (except for the value items) as quietly as possible as they went. They met at the council room, ensured that they had recharged their tranq dart magazines, then Chuck, Sarah, Carina and Zondra breached the room and tranqed everyone in there inside ten seconds.

Sarah walked up to Quinn's unconscious body and stood over him, literally shaking with her need to destroy this monster who had almost destroyed her and killed Chuck. Chuck went to her and wrapped himself around her, drawing her into his embrace, she held rigid for about 30 seconds before she let herself melt into his arms and started sobbing. Chuck locked eyes with Carina over her head and nodded to the door, they'd discussed this scenario so she quickly organised for all the tranquillised baddies to be bound and gagged, left a guard of four from the strike teams outside the door, then she and Zondra each took an eight man team and rejoined the clean up operation. Carina also contacted Josie and Alex and told them that they didn't need to be quiet any more, so they started ripping through the building with the thumper rounds to clear any resistance ahead of their people. Josie and Alex's support helped make quick work of everyone else left in the building, and it was over within fifteen minutes.

Once that was done all the captives were transported to one of the commercial buildings that they'd acquired and locked down in holding areas (watched over by the strike team to ensure that they stayed alive until the CI team was ready for them) and then they began the interrogations, starting with the council. It was going to take quite a while, as they had over fifty subjects to get through. The interrogations were split up between Chuck, Sarah, Casey, Mary, Carina and Zondra, with Chuck and Sarah taking the "elders", and Quinn.

While all that was happening the building was swept for any remaining personnel and (more to the point) to collect any resources that could be used to gain intel on BGRU, computers, communications equipment (to scan the logs and trace the communications), paperwork, anything that could be of use in tracking down the BGRU sites and personnel. They left Ellie, Heather, Josie and Alex with half the strike team to get that done, blow the building and get out before the Police or emergency services turned up, it didn't feel good to leave them there like that, but they had to interrogate the senior people while there was a chance, as they had the most valuable intel locked away in their heads. Blowing the building was risky, but given that the police would probably have been getting reports that a war was going on, there was a reasonable chance that the explosion would be put down to rival crime families trying to wipe each other out, or something of that nature.

Sarah got Quinn, she couldn't be denied that, but Chuck was in the room with them to control the situation if needed. Sarah remembered what happened with the Ring Director and conceded that she'd probably need Chuck to prevent her from killing Quinn before they got everything out of him, and she needed him to be there for her anyway (just as he always was). Quinn and the others started out cocky, but they quickly found out what Sarah's "instructors" had found when Chuck tracked them down, that what was in the Intersect on "enhanced interrogation" went far further than any of them could have imagined in their worst nightmares. Yes, everyone talks as the maxim goes, but when faced with those techniques they told EVERYTHING. Sarah started out with the old favourites on Quinn, fingers and toes and other appendages, but that wasn't enough to get everything out of him, nor did it do justice to what he took from her and almost managed to make her do, so she gave in and accessed the Intersect's Little Shop of Horrors. She tried a number of the methods in the book of secrets, and it turned out that strong Acid applied internally (and externally for that matter) was apparently what it took to make a man like that really talk, though she found that she needed to repeat the questions several times, as towards the end what came out wasn't usually words. Eventually, after a day and a half of constant interrogations, they had well over a hundred hours of recordings to go through and all of BGRU's "best and brightest" (well the ones there, anyway) were eliminated. The building had been mined to be a convincing "accident", and to ensure that all DNA evidence would be completely eliminated. They watched from a safe distance while the building went up then went home to have several showers and try to wipe the last couple of days from their memories.

Over the next week they tried to mop up the BGRU operatives who weren't in the building at the time and jumped into working through the intel they brought back from the building, and the interrogation transcripts to track down the other BGRU sites and personnel before they went to ground. As soon as they confirmed any intel it was fed to the General's trusted team via an excessively secure link to an equally excessive secure facility for them to co-ordinate with the President and his "team" around the world to get the operations commenced ASAP. By the end of the two week operation, according to the reports received they'd managed to wipe out approximately three quarters of the BGRU remnants, so hopefully they were down to a couple of thousand leftovers of BGRU out there.

With the big push done, they went back through everything in an attempt to determine whether they had missed anything in their rush to mop up everyone possible. This time it took a couple of months, checking and re-checking everything, and yes, of course they'd missed some items, they had numerous leads to follow up on other resources, some directly related to the sites they'd hit, others apparently separate, but it didn't appear that they'd missed anything that was too major. They also had to start working through all the resources that had been recovered in the mop up operation around the world. More worrying were the indications that some of the mission reports, at least, appeared to have been doctored or fabricated, as they were getting hits from their on-going searches on BGRU personnel who were supposedly terminated in the mop up operation. Obviously BGRU still had hooks into the governments and intelligence organisations around the world, including the USA, as some of the ones who weren't supposed to exist any more were in the USA, at that they were a little dejected, was this ever going to be over?

On a lighter note, Diane and Roan came down to have the DMI loaded, and spend a couple of weeks with Josie and the family. The DMI load and optimisation went smoothly for both of them, and they were most of the way to being acclimatised by the time they left, but the time to spend as an extended family was the best part of it for everyone else, they had two teenagers in the family now, and the rest of the kids were closing fast on that age, so there were lots of "family" activities they they could now do without leaving anyone out, it made it a fun couple of weeks while they largely blocked out their "real" lives and enjoyed themselves.


	17. The Boys are Back in Town 1

**OK, there's something in this one that doesn't have anything in the series to directly support it, except for the notable gaps, and the fact that someone obviously didn't get what she was from one parent.**

**Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters portrayed...**

After a couple of months of monitoring for all the usual suspects, and sifting through the computer disks, device logs, paperwork etc that had been collected when the teams moved on the BGRU sites, it appeared that they may have accounted for about half of what was left of BGRU at the time (not the three quarters that was reported, which was in an of itself a rather significant worry as it showed just how compromised the organisations that they were expected to rely on still were). They organised a few other mop up operations but the result wasn't significant in regard to reducing the size of what was left of BGRU.

Of course, after the operation they launched against Quinn and co, Chuck and half of the "family" was back to having trouble sleeping due to what they'd had to do in the strike against Quinn's operation, so Chuck had company working out and sparring down in the bunker at night (including Sarah quite often). The fact that their endurance was significantly increased now by the Intersect meant that they had to work harder to wear themselves out enough to sleep, but that just meant that they were getting taut and terrific that much faster (Molly was actually getting jealous that the older generation were so much tighter and hotter than she was as a teenager, so she started working out with them, well she tried to though she didn't have a hope of keeping up with them).

Given that they had been primarily targeted via the Carmichael Industries offices, they decided that, rather than re-open those offices, it was time to get rid of them. Therefore they removed all of their special equipment and sold them off to the government via the General, as it was a perfect setup for an operations office, and the security and technology features that made it perfect for that would have raised questions if it was sold to civilians (and they really couldn't keep blowing up their operations centres to cover up the evidence as that WOULD raise questions in the wrong places).

They replaced the CI offices with a large hanger building at the nearest airport that was big enough to handle the SonicStars at full take off load. It cost quite a bit to build a structure that size to their security and operational specs and have it fitted out for the operations that were required, but they certainly had the funds, and it was a better solution overall for them. They really had no need for formal offices, or for that matter a formal company, any more as what work they did now was 100% government related, and if they had any need for face to face meetings they'd go to them. Therefore, having a secure hanger for their fleet of aircraft (with room to spare for other transport planes), which also held operations centres etc and could house strike teams of over a hundred comfortably for whatever period required made rather more sense than maintaining a "front" office which basically just painted a target on their backs. The fact that it was located close enough to Castle Carmichael that they could get to and from home quickly was another bonus. Of course, most of the Clan missed the significance when Chuck named the new centre "Laputa", but Sarah had been subjected to enough of his viewing tastes to get it, and call him a dork.

Given the amount of BGRU that appeared to be left, it was obvious that they wouldn't be able to back off too far from being operationally ready any time soon, but they were out of immediate danger, so it was the opportunity for those who wanted to step away from the action to do so. Kathleen did get her Intersect backed off to the DMI version, but she kept up the operational training and made sure that it was understood that she'd go back to the full action capability if and when it was required. Ellie, Stefan, Jeff and, surprisingly, Emma, went another way (but still under the same understanding as Kathleen), they all had most of the action database removed, and Stefan, Jeff and Emma had their Intersect versions brought up to the full versions for the data processing then had the intel sections of the Intersect database loaded, which meant that they all had the equivalent Intersect resources to Chuck, Sarah and Ellie for utilising the Intersect data, Stefan and Jeff of course were already primarily working in that space, but Emma had been contributing more and more in that area in recent times.

In the aftermath of the Quinn exercise, once all the panic of locating the BGRU bases etc was over, Emma had sat down with Sarah and Chuck to fill them in on the periods where she'd been missing from Sarah's life. It was Sarah's first time hearing what Emma was telling them, and Chuck said that he'd let them discuss it alone, but both of them said "No!" simultaneously, with Emma going on to say that Chuck was Sarah's life now, and he deserved to hear it from her, rather than make Sarah try to explain it to him later. Sarah just nodded as she said that and held his hand tightly to prevent him from leaving. Emma looked down for a minute or so to compose herself and then looked back up at them as she began to speak.

She started by telling them that she had actually been working with Jack on his cons up until after Sarah was a toddler (she'd long since stopped hesitating when she said Sarah, even when she was talking about her childhood, she WAS Sarah to her now), and she'd generally been the one who did all the organisation and planning, to try and keep him out of trouble (she looked up at Sarah and said with a smile that her father had always been more of a charmer than a thinker, Sarah nodded with a little smile). When Sarah was about three or so, one of Jack's cons went terribly wrong because he'd gotten too ambitious and when it came crashing down he ran, not checking on where she was until he was out of town, but the problem was that he hadn't let her know that the con was blown, so she had no idea that she needed to run until it was too late and she was arrested.

While she was in custody, a man came in who said he was from the government. He went over the evidence of what had been done to set up the con and asked her about what parts she'd contributed to the planning, when she admitted that she'd done pretty much all of the planning he proposed a series of scenarios to her to see what solutions she'd come up with for those scenarios. They were in there for a few hours running those scenarios, and in the end he said that he could get her out of her current predicament if she did some jobs for the government (at this point Sarah and Chuck looked at each other, and Sarah told her mother that she had some things to tell her when she was finished, too, Emma just nodded), anyway, as she had Sarah to look after, she was prepared to do whatever was necessary (within reason) to prevent being taken away from her, so she'd agreed to take what he was offering.

They set it up that she would go back to her "normal" life, so long as she never said anything to anyone about the deal she'd made and she was never part of Jack's cons again. She'd be called to go away for up to a couple of months at a time to work on assignments and she'd stay locked up in the government facilities for the duration of those assignments. From then on she was called away three or four times a year to work for them, and then she'd go home again once they released her. That was why she was away those times that Jack took Sarah away with him to help him on his cons. Anyway, after the last time that he took Sarah away and they didn't come back, Emma had used her connections to get a new identity and slipped away, contacting her mother for news of Sarah whenever she could and arranging a contact mechanism via her. Sarah looked at her and asked what work she'd done for the government. At that Emma said that she wasn't a spy or anything like they were, she hesitated and then said that she was mainly doing the type of analysis that she'd been helping with here recently, which was why it had came to mind, that was over 20 years ago but it was all so familiar when she started working on the problems with them. (Emma shook her head then, saying that she seemed to be remembering more, and thinking more clearly lately, perhaps that was why she started noticing the things that she did and bringing them up, but then she shook her head again and said that it was probably just her imagination.) Chuck asked if she knew who she was working for, but she shook her head to that, saying that she would be picked up in a van or something and taken to some facilities that were god knows where, she'd be instructed to call the people there Mr Brown, Mr White, Mr Smith or something similar, and when the assignment was finished she'd be taken back and dropped off somewhere that she could get home from. Chuck and Sarah looked at each other again and Chuck asked for all the names she'd been known by up until she was arrested and when she was working for them, noting them down and giving them both a hug and a kiss before he went off to do some research, while Sarah filled mother in on her own very similar story about how she was roped into working for the CIA (leaving out those elements that she'd told Chuck that would horrify her mother and break her heart).

Chuck came back about half an hour later, confirming that Emma had in fact been coerced into being an off the books CIA analyst by one of Graham's predecessors, and by the way, the CIA had been very impressed with the work that she'd done for them, the reports had been quite glowing about her ability and solutions. He started to say something else and then stopped, Sarah and Emma both looked at him and when he didn't continue Emma said "Say it Chuck." Chuck looked down for a bit before raising his head to look at them, telling them that the reason that Sarah had been on the CIA's radar was because of Emma's exceptional ability, they had been monitoring her to see whether she would turn out to be another prodigy like her mother.

At that Emma broke down, saying that it was her fault that her baby had been dragged into that world. They both went to her, telling her that that wasn't true, Chuck put his arms around her while Sarah knelt in front of her, holding her hands. Sarah pointed out that it was Jack that handed them the means to get to her, if he hadn't kept trying his scams and screwing up, the CIA wouldn't have had a way to get their hands on her and force her to do what they wanted, so in fact it was Jack's fault that they were both dragged into that world. She looked up at Chuck and then back to her mother as she also pointed out softly that if she hadn't been dragged into the CIA she wouldn't have met Chuck and they wouldn't have the family or life they had at the moment, would they? Emma smiled through her tears at that and buried her face in Chuck's shoulder as she cried herself out.

When she had settled down a little, Chuck said that it had explained one thing anyway, they both looked up at him with questioning eyes, so he continued, saying that Sarah was brilliant, she could pull the situation apart, analyse it and plan an operation better than just about anyone (except you, interjected Sarah with a smile), and that ability never made sense when he looked at her father, but finding out that her mother was one of the CIA's better kept secrets as a highly valued analyst, that made much more sense. Sarah nodded with a smile, agreeing that she certainly didn't get her brains from her father but stopped and looked back to him, saying "But he's a hell of a dancer", which made Chuck grin. Emma smiled and said yes he was, but obviously she was missing something here? Sarah apologised and told her about Chuck meeting Jack for the first time, and how that line had come out, which managed to make Emma laugh.

When he had a chance, Chuck took Ellie aside and asked her to start re-testing everyone (including full scans), and to start with himself, Emma, their father, and Sarah (and Jeff, he added a few seconds later, realising that if they were checking to see whether previous damage to the brain was being remedied, Jeff would be a likely candidate. He may not have had the intersect in his head, tearing up pathways and overloading areas of his brain, but he'd certainly done a lot of self inflicted damage), he told her what Emma had mentioned when she was talking to them and said that it would be very interesting to see what, if any, difference there was between the pre-Bartowski Intersect tests and the Post-BI tests. Ellie nodded with a thoughtful look, saying that if there was a notable difference it would be worth making the tests a regular item for everyone to track what changes were occurring, then looked at him and told him she'd get onto it.

The changes of Intersect focus that Ellie, Stefan, Jeff, Emma and Kathleen had taken on made the others think about where they wanted to be positioned now. Given that they'd had the Intersect for months now and it was sitting comfortably, Mary and Carina decided that they'd like to see how they went with the full version, as the access to the Intersect intel was something that they saw as quite valuable, given that the majority of what they did nowadays was more analyst than operative related, so Stefan worked up the changes to the Intersect software and prepared a version of the Intel database to be added for them, and once they were loaded, optimised for them and acclimatised they could add more of the intel database as a staged approach. It took them a while to get used to the extra load and functionality, and Mary in particular found herself quite often looking at her son, wondering how he could have handled having several times this much in his head and staying sane all that time, especially when it was the earlier, rougher versions of the Intersect than the one that Stefan and Ellie devised that he'd been using in his head most of the time. Stefan watched her sometimes when she was looking at Chuck like this and one time he leaned over to her and said quietly "That's why I always said he was special, because no-one else could have handled it".

One advantage that CI still had was that at least ten to fifteen of the BGRU "party rebels" were still out there, so they were still getting hits on various locations when these guys would defy orders and go out, this was a major win for the monitoring, because the rest of BGRU had really done underground, other than the rebels they weren't getting more than a hit every week or two worldwide. The intel they got from the last mop up operation helped them narrow down the locations of the last BGRU bases, and they were running their usual real estate, utilities etc searches in an attempt to nail them down. They were also intensifying the satellite imagery and security camera scans for anywhere they believed that there was a BGRU presence, they were getting some hits out of that, but not many. That wasn't so surprising, given that what was left of BGRU was in a panic and going deep underground to try and prevent discovery.

With the rarity of hits on the BGRU "people", it was a major shock when a hit came up on a name that they KNEW couldn't be alive, because Chuck and Sarah had shot him to pieces, literally. But for all that they were seeing both the name Langston Graham and a face that certainly looked like his up on the displays. They scraped all images relating to the hit and put them up on all the available screen real estate, in the process they found a few more known BGRU faces in the background, so that confirmed that it was still related to the organisation. Their first thoughts were that someone may have dug up a Graham look alike to parade around and use as a puppet to gain control of what was left (a puppet for the puppet master, that was interesting?), but when they analysed the images they realised that it was a much younger man, probably in his mid to late twenties, so that couldn't be right. The reason that they hadn't picked his age at first was that there was something definitely wrong about him, he looked far too worn out and haggard for a man of his age, and he moved like a geriatric. One thing WAS obvious, though, he was most definitely related to Langston Graham, not just because he tripped the image recognition programs for Graham, but also because most of his mannerisms were Graham's, too. The only thing that they could think of was that this man was Graham's son, even though there were no records of Graham having a son. Chuck broadened the parameters on the image recognition software and ran the search for Graham again over the real time and archival records, trying to get a better idea of where this man came from, and why he had suddenly turned up in South America.

With the looser search parameters, they of course got thousands of hits on the possible Graham images, so they sat down to do what Chuck and Sarah had done when they were searching for his father, go through them one at a time and flag the ones that looked promising, then go through them again, looking closer until they were relatively certain of what they had. At least they could share the load across the team this time, so it was much easier and quicker. The first cut reduced the pool to 4-500 images and videos, the second took it down to about a hundred and fifty, the next to fifty, but on the final cut they still had about twenty images that looked solid, and the problem was that they obviously weren't of the same man. What they had was images of possibly ten to fifteen different men ranging in age from the first one they'd found (possibly late twenties) down to mid-teens. The images were from South America, Eastern Europe and China, for some reason. There were only two who appeared to be in their twenties, and a few more in their late teens, the rest seemed to be in their mid-teens. Another thing that was strange was that they all (the older ones especially) seemed to be sickly and, well, "wrong", there was definitely something not quite right about them. The only concept that seemed to make any sense was that Graham had initiated another breeding program, this time using himself as the focus. Presumably he'd been spreading his seed via artificial insemination and surrogate mothers to ensure that he had heirs to take over his empire when he was ready to step down.

The sickly state of all these men made them wonder whether there was some serious genetic defect in Graham's family tree, Graham had always seemed quite robust, but all of his sons (they presumed) appeared quite frail and struggling to manage. Given the sound scientific basis that had driven the Bartowski breeding plan, it seemed strange that Graham wouldn't have taken similar measures to ensure that his own heirs were as healthy and sound as they could be. The fact that they'd never discovered anything about Graham's sons in any of the BGRU files was another conundrum, as you'd think that he would have put measures in place to ensure that they were looked after, education, support, protective details, all of the things that you'd expect to find in spades for the heirs to the empire had been totally missing, even from Graham's private files. For that matter they hadn't even found any indications that he'd visited or communicated with the BGRU (or any other) facilities where they'd found the heirs.

To get to the root of the matter, they initiated searches to try and identify and back track these men, in hope that they could uncover what Graham's plan actually had been, and why he had gone to such lengths to keep their existence a secret.

While all the research about Graham's heirs was going on, Ellie completed the testing and scans on everyone that Chuck had requested, so they sat down (with Sarah, as she was the only other one across this as yet) to go through the results, and the comparisons with the pre-BI tests and scans (luckily Ellie had insisted on full scans for everyone before they had any significant procedures, because she wanted to ensure that she had every piece of information available to evaluate the risks before she allowed anything to progress (well, except for Stefan, but they did have all the tests that she'd been doing on him to keep track of his progress and condition back to when they suppressed the Intersect in him when they recovered him from the Russian Intersect facility), and she had missed some of Chuck's scans prior to the load of the final version, but she also had a scans on him gong back years as she'd been monitoring him and Sarah along with their father). The results were quite interesting, as there was a clear indication in nearly every case that any evidence of damage or trauma was reduced after the BI was loaded.

In their father's case, the indicators that they'd associated with Intersect activity and damage (from the very rough early version that he'd loaded into himself while he was developing the Intersect) were largely repaired, and so was the other damage that they presumed was a result of his death and the Ring's revival process. In Sarah's case, the damage caused by the flawed Ring Intersect that she loaded and Quinn intentionally overloading the Intersect in an attempt to burn out her memories of her life with Chuck were also showing signs that they were largely repaired (Chuck beamed and squeezed her hand when they looked at these results).

Looking at Chuck's scans, they saw more evidence of damage and trauma than on anyone else's. It was clear how much damage the early Intersect versions caused (Version 1.0, the Fulcrum Intersect that burnt out the brains of everyone else who it was loaded into, Version 2.0 before the governor, and probably that very early version he loaded when he was six), and also the separate and quite distinct damage caused when the Belgian's scientist was trying to erase his memories and personality to unlock the Intersect, but in his case as well, much of that damage appeared to be being repaired.

When they got to Emma's results, they looked for evidence to support Chuck's theory that it may have been the BI which prompted her to remember her previous life as an analyst, over 20 years ago, and improved her abilities in this area. Emma's pre-BI tests didn't show any significant damage or trauma, she hadn't led the crazy life that the rest of them had and hadn't damaged her brain through her own or other's efforts, but the pre-BI scans did show "dead" areas that may have degraded through age or other reasons, and it was apparent that these "dead" areas were also being repaired post-BI, so it appeared to be reasonable to presume that the BI had, in fact, "fixed" the previous lapses that she had.

When they'd gone through everyone's results and had seen improvements on some level in every case, they sat back and looked at each other. Quite aside from any other aspect of the BI, and it was by far the most powerful and effective version of the Intersect that had ever been created (not surprising, considering it was the only version that was ever designed and created by the original designer (in partnership with his brilliant Neurologist daughter and equally brilliant son) without any interference from outside parties with hidden agendas), the BI was apparently also an incredible healing tool that repaired and enhanced the host's brain and body by triggering its innate repair mechanisms while it was operating. As a medical professional and scientist, Ellie wanted to publish these results for the world to see, but she knew that she couldn't, as they couldn't let the world know about anything this powerful. Chuck and their father had been hunted and/or tortured to get the Intersect for the entire time the outside world knew that it existed. They only dropped off the radar when a) the rest of the world was convinced that their father was dead, and b) the people hunting it were assured that it had been removed from Chuck's head. If word got out that they'd recreated the Intersect, and that they'd created the ultimate version, none of the family would ever be safe again.


	18. The Boys are Back in Town 2

**Usual disclaimer for the Land of Litigation, no rights to any characters portrayed.**

One thing was immediately obvious when they started looking for information about Graham's "heirs", they had never imagined that information could be so hard to find. To start with, what was left of BGRU was hiding so far underground that they were having trouble getting anything useful on any part of their organisation, and the heirs were obviously the most closely guarded secret that they had. If Chuck was a betting man he would have bet that rather less than 1% of the BGRU remnants had ever heard of the heirs.

Chuck was working on the theory that the only reason that they were seeing the "heirs" at all was because some of the elders were trying to use them for political mileage in their bids for leadership. That didn't bode well for the heirs once the leadership had what they wanted, but considering who their father was, it was difficult to get too worried about them, being the sons of a monster didn't automatically make them monsters, but the chance that they'd follow in his footsteps was enough to wish them gone, to protect the world.

It was the fact that the heirs were ghosts that made tracking them so very difficult, they didn't have names, origins, anything, and no-one seemed to know about them. Even in China, where they should have stood out so much, they couldn't find any mention of them, the only times that they had appeared was when BGRU was moving them, and they happened to be caught on camera. They had the best luck with the first one that they found (the heir apparent, as it were, as he was obviously the eldest). Given the failure of their on-line investigation to yield any real results, Zondra and Heather went down to South America to do the ground work for the investigation the old fashioned way, because two attractive women looking for the men who had "run out on them" without giving them what they'd promised, that could often get answers in some circles. They trolled the markets, hotels and party scenes and slowly gathered enough clues over a period of three or four months to backtrack the man and his retinue to the villages where he grew up, but the woman who had given birth to him (obviously a surrogate mother) and her husband had died in a car accident over twenty years ago, and the people who took him in after they died were also killed when they were caught in a cartel shoot-out about ten to twelve years later, after that he lived by himself.

It was obvious that the people behind this were trying to ensure that nothing was left to track him, or who was controlling him, but they hadn't planned for the level of investigation that Clan Carmichael could mount. Chuck, Stefan and the rest of the team back home were chasing all the electronic records and transactions that existed in regard to him and his erstwhile "parents". The electronic records were sketchy but they showed that the payments had come from shell accounts that were difficult to back track through, in the early days at least, but they managed to trace some payments back to Ring or BGRU accounts over the past fifteen to twenty years, and were trying to identify the authorisation for those payments to find files related to them (they were only just now beginning to realise how paranoid Graham really was, he hadn't trusted anyone apparently). While they were in South America, Zondra and Heather charmed their way into (or broke into) the physical records for anything they could find that was related to the families or the boy/man himself. When they managed to locate and acquire his medical records from the doctors who had looked after him for most of his life (and he had needed a lot of medical attention), they were an eye opener. The medical records appeared to support the theory of genetic defects, as he had so many things wrong with him that it was a wonder that he was still alive, and he wouldn't be without nearly constant medical attention.

Zondra and Heather spent similar amounts of time tracking down some of the other heirs that they located in South America and Eastern Europe, and what they managed to find painted a very similar picture, surrogate mother, her and the "father" were killed when the boy was 7-8 at which point he was taken in by another family, and the new "parents" died as well about ten years later. Obviously the determination had been made that these ages were the key points to separate them from the people that were raising them and that that was somehow significant in their development, but no standard medical theories seemed to support that (except for the first one perhaps, on the basis of the 0-7, 7-14, and 14-21 key learning age periods), so it was just another part of the mystery. They also dug up enough medical records on the others to show that their health was nearly as bad as the heir apparent's. At least with a few other data points they had a better chance of mapping out the process that was being followed and confirming the patterns, but unfortunately that still wasn't leading them to the key information of who exactly they were and why everything was under such tight secrecy (unless Graham WAS just a paranoid lunatic, but if he was he'd been that way for over thirty years, and it would have been hard to go as far as he did like that).

When the girls tried to track down the ones that had been located in China, though, they almost came unstuck. They never knew whether it was because they stood out more in China or the watchers were more diligent there, but they hadn't managed to find much information before they became the hunted themselves and had to run, only just getting out with their lives. So they came home after well over a year of punting around the world on their investigations to find that they had a hard time settling into the "quiet" life in Castle Carmichael again, even though they could admit that it was good to be home with the family again. They did get something out of the girls' misadventure, at least, apparently China was where they needed to focus their efforts to track this matter down. The nature of the teams that came after them made it quite obvious that something there was being guarded very professionally, and the fact that some of the heirs were also located there was not likely to be a coincidence.

Of course, being back with the family did have its upsides, sixteen months made a lot of difference with the kids growing up as fast as they were, Molly was almost finished College, Clara was nearly out of her teens, Charlie and Susie were almost eighteen, Yvonne, Zack and Wendy were in their mid teens and even Sarah's babies, Jaqui and Piotr, were almost teenagers now. Molly was the only one who looked pretty much the same as she had when they went on the assignment, and while they didn't say anything in front of them (of course), the six Bartowski children (Ellie had changed both her's and Clara's names back to Bartowski after the divorce was finalised and Jill had named Charlie Charles Bartowski from birth) made the other three girls (and just about everyone else) look positively ordinary in comparison. (Zondra and Heather joked between themselves about the fact that Charlie and Zack were so gorgeous that they would have loved to further their "education", if they didn't know what Carina and Sarah would do to them, but if they'd known how many (of both sexes and all ages) had been prowling after Clara, Charlie, Yvonne and Zack (and Jaqui and Piotr for that matter) over the past eighteen months, they wouldn't have considered joking about it. Things had gotten to the point where even Ellie supported them carrying weapons at all times, and Chuck and Stefan had come up with a much smaller, lighter hideaway pistol (only 14cm long and with a pair of tube magazines for up to a 14 shot capacity that pretty much fitted into the hand) that they could carry covertly to protect themselves. The hideaway pistols were so handy and effective that everyone carried one pretty much constantly after that.) The girls did join Josie and Alex in going out partying with Molly and her girlfriends from college (Ellie had bowed out of that scene as she wanted to set a better example to Clara), because Emma and Sarah had long since decided that Molly was old enough to make her own choices, and therefore wouldn't blame them for leading her astray when they went wild with the college guys that they picked up on those nights out.

Now that the girls were back, they could fill in the blanks on what they'd found when they were chasing down the heirs, the reports were useful, but interactive accounts of what they saw and found managed to fill in the gaps where a written report didn't quite answer the questions. Mind you, the reports that they'd sent in gave the team back home a lot to work on, and allowed Chuck to formulate the additional searches (based on the medical conditions that they shared) that let them confirm that the heir apparent and the other heir over twenty had both apparently succumbed to their conditions (hardly shocking, give their level of health). The most obvious explanation was that the strain of being dragged away from their homes and paraded around the BGRU upper echelon in an attempt to garner support for leadership bids was too much for them and killed them early. The medical condition searches also uncovered 5 - 10 other probable heirs (on the basis of medical condition and descriptions) who had also died in recent years from similar conditions, and several other possible heirs who may be still alive.

One thing that was puzzling was that all the "heirs" appeared to be male, but they had basically put that down to Graham's well known misogyny, and the prevalent attitudes among the types that made up BGRU (and most of the intelligence community for that matter), as well as the engrained culture in the parts of the world that the "heirs" had been found in. Girls were generally considered worthless by these types, so they just presumed that any girls that had been born were just left with their surrogate mothers and forgotten about by Graham.

With the extra details that the girls had discovered, they had far more to search with now, so they were getting more potential hits, but as with the looser parameters on Graham's image searches, this meant that they had thousands of probable false positives to filter out if they were to get a better grasp on the situation. The indications were that the operation began in South America, but the focus moved to Eastern Europe after that, and finally to China, and from what they could see to date, China was still the focal point for the operation. That, in and of itself, created serious problems, as they had far less leverage in China than they did anywhere else. They had a few contacts in the party who owed them for what they'd done for them in the past, but it was the largest and strongest communist regime in the world, and they couldn't just come and go like they could in other countries, that restricted their actions quite a bit. So the team ran their searches, filtered the results and followed up on anything that looked like a good lead, and ever so slowly, they built the picture of Langston Graham's "heirs", this was going to be a long, drawn out process.

Throughout this process, Clan Carmichael maintained a state of readiness to handle what was thrown at them, everyone, including their "civilians" and the kids, did daily workouts and training to keep in top shape and keep their skills honed (it took Zondra and Heather well over a month to get back up to speed, but they did). Chuck and Sarah watched their kids training and sparring against the others and shared a troubled, sad, look, they were supposed to be kids enjoying themselves but instead they were facing up to some of the best warriors out there and holding their own. They watched their 13 year old daughter take down Carina, who was among the best out there (and enhanced/boosted by the BI to boot) and realised that Graham's super spy breeding program had succeeded, they'd both been used to create the ultimate soldiers/spies. Something else occurred to them as well, too, they had been used to breed the ultimate warriors, but the family had also created the ultimate Intersect, which boosted anyone beyond where they were (even more so if they were compatible with the Intersect), so when their children were old enough to take the Bartowski Intersect safely, they would be unstoppable, so they had indeed created what Graham had been planning for four decades, but the laugh was on him and the empire that he wanted them to serve, as they were dedicated to taking it down, just like the rest of the family.


	19. The Boys are Back in Town 3

**Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters portrayed.**

Gathering information on the "heirs' was painfully slow, but it was coming together. Over the space of about twelve months, they had tracked down at least partial medical records for about fifty probable "heirs", and they did not tell a pretty story. Over half had almost certain terminal medical problems, and the fact that the medical issues were reduced, the younger they were, was something that screamed for attention, even though it could just be that their medical problems became more chronic after they reached their mid-teens? Something in the back of Chuck's head kept nagging him, but he just couldn't put his finger on it. As their resident medical expert, Ellie also examined the medical records repeatedly, trying to work out what she was missing.

The records that they did manage to locate made them seriously question whether the "heirs" in their mid-teens were, in fact, the youngest, given the indications were that there were initially 5 – 10 "heirs" each year and the younger the "heirs" were, the healthier they were, it didn't make sense that they'd just have stopped about 15 - 16 years ago. (What eventually came out was that the production eventually stopped about 5 years ago, Graham had funded about four years ahead and stayed away so that there were no leads back to him from the facilities, and they kept operating for about four years after he died (until the money ran out), because they were afraid to stop working until he gave orders to stop.) The prime instruments that they'd been using to locate the "heirs" (the image searches based on Langston Graham) weren't likely to get hits on boys who were early teens at the eldest, because of the changes that would happen to the facial structure between childhood and maturity, so Chuck and the others were trying to think of search parameters that would get them around that, but with little success. They did try their own variation of the FBI's software that was used to project what a face would look like at varying stages of life, but the umpteen thousands of hits they got on that meant that it would be a long time (if ever) before they got any usable results from those searches, given the rest of the variables.

In the midst of this, Yvonne and Zack had their sixteenth birthday. Their parents smiled when it was Zack who suggested that Yvonne have her Sweet Sixteen party on the Saturday and he could have some friends over afterwards on the Sunday, hopefully that meant they weren't doing too bad a job as parents when their children were this caring towards each other? Being summer, and seeing that they had a full sized pool at Castle Carmichael, Yvonne's party ended up being a pool party. While all her girlfriends were insanely jealous of how hot her mother (and sister, and cousin, and aunts, and HER) looked, and had the hots for her brothers (and father) it was going great until Yvonne turned to see what her friends were looking at, only to find that it was her parents off under the trees, making out, she watched as her father reached down to gently cup her mother's behind and effortlessly lift her with one hand (with hardly a sign of muscle action, let alone strain) to his lips for a kiss, a kiss that started out chaste enough until her mother wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and turned it into something rather more passionate. Her friends just gasped as she coughed and said "Yeah, they're fairly affectionate." Yvonne turned away but her friends just stood and stared, eventually her mother registered that they were being stared at and looked around, quickly hopping down to straighten herself out when she saw the audience before she wandered off in Yvonne's direction, pausing to kiss her daughter and whisper "Sorry Sweetie" as she passed. It took Yvonne a while to turn the conversation away from what they'd just watched after that, but the party went on, and everyone had a good time. Chuck and Sarah managed to avoid repeat of the show at Zack's party the next day.

A week or so after the twins' parties, Chuck was winding up Casey about his taste in music when he was playing country, and it was Casey's defensive response of "Dolly's a hell of a woman" that finally made the niggle that had been at the back of his head whenever he was trying to work out Graham's "heirs" came to the fore. He broke off his conversation with Casey and literally ran off, leaving Casey looking after him as if he was crazy (not that there was anything unusual about that). As soon as Chuck was down in the bunker in front of the big screen he brought up all of the heir's medical records to compare them, after about ten minutes he called Ellie and asked her to come down to the bunker. When Ellie arrived (with Stefan, Mary, Casey, Sarah and Carina as they all knew that something was going on), Chuck asked her what the probability of multiple siblings having identical medical afflictions (waving at the screen) was, Ellie paused while she accessed the medical database in her Intersect and made a determination before giving him a response that was extremely low. Chuck nodded, still looking at her, and then asked "What about clones?" Ellie stared at him in shock before turning to the massive display in front of her. She spent about five minutes doing the same comparisons he had as she accessed what clone related information she had, before turning back to him to say that the probability for clones was considerably higher, and it was high enough to explain this (as she waved at what was on the big screen).

Ellie shook her head, asking how she could have missed it, she knew something was off but she hadn't twigged to the obvious answer, Chuck nodded, saying that he didn't click to it either until Casey said something about Dolly, and then it fell into place. Mary interjected to ask what Dolly Parton had to do with anything, so Ellie turned to her to say "Nothing, other than the fact that the first viable cloned sheep was named after her nearly thirty years ago." She went on to explain that the aspects of the medical records that had been puzzling both Chuck and herself were that they were too similar to be explained by any normal circumstances, siblings (except for identical twins, perhaps) would have some genetic variation between them, and therefore it made no sense at all that nearly all of the "heirs" had almost identical medical conditions. On the other hand, if the heirs were all, in fact, clones of one individual (Langston Graham), then it was conceivable that they would all be genetically identical. One of the key factors was how new cloning technology was, thirty years ago was the first time they managed to viably clone a mammal (Dolly the sheep), and the failure rate was terrible at that time, things had been slowly improving, but it was less than ten years ago (in China, she added, looking at Chuck thoughtfully, who nodded) that they had managed to get the process working to the point where the success rate without serious complications in pigs was over 80%, so that would probably explain why all the "heirs" that they had located so far had had so many medical issues, if they were clones it was amazing that the older ones they had found survived this long.

They all went quiet for a while as they considered the ramifications of what appeared to be in front of them, given what they knew of Graham's megalomania, it made sense that he was trying to create an army of clones of himself to run his empire. (When Sarah thought of an army of clones she suddenly went pale and grabbed Chuck's arm, asking what use would four super soldiers be in controlling the world? Chuck's eyes went wide as he realised what she was saying, once Graham had managed to successfully clone himself to run the empire, he could have cloned their children to create the army that kept the world under his thumb, that was why he wasn't worried that there were only four children in one family that came out of the second generation of his breeding program, he didn't want breeding stock, he wanted clone templates!). The others looked at them, asking what had terrified them that way, so Chuck explained as he held Sarah, who had started to cry. When he had done so the others looked horrified, but were nodding as it made a sickening kind of sense.

Given the probability of what they now believed to be the secret behind the "heirs", they resolved to track down and destroy any and all mechanisms that were being used to perpetrate this, as they now not only had to wipe out the last dregs of BGRU, they had a very real need to protect their family from this. Once they had calmed enough to discuss the situation, they called the family (except the kids) down to the bunker to explain what they had found, this time Ellie did the talking as Chuck and Sarah were at the end of the conference table, holding onto each other. The whole family was (of course) behind their need to ensure that they wiped out all records and development on Graham's cloning program. What to do about any remaining "heirs", and even more importantly, any Bartowski clones that they may have already created was a much bigger issue. Try as they might, they couldn't separate emotion from reason enough to make any decisions at that point, so they decided to put that question aside until they discovered any clones who weren't already doomed experiments.

Given the new priority, they once again put aside any government work and just concentrated on tracking BGRU and trying to locate the cloning facilities that Graham had been using, the main thing in their favour now was the fact that they knew that they needed to focus on China, and that they were, in fact, looking for cloning facilities. They also had another angle to search for, and much as they dreaded finding results on it, they initiated other searches on the childhood images of their own children.

Given that they finally had a better idea of what they were looking for, they also did more research into Graham's origins and found what they believed to be the reason behind the heirs' parents' deaths, apparently when Langston Graham was seven, his parents died in a car crash and he was adopted by another couple. Then when he was eighteen his adopted parents were shot and killed in an armed robbery gone wrong. So apparently the "parents" of the heirs were being killed in the same timeframes in an attempt to recreate Langston Graham's childhood and teenage years more authentically, which was obviously intended to mould the clones into a closer copy of his mindset through similar life experiences.

Now that they could focus the searches onto relevant criteria, they were getting results faster, and unfortunately the results that they DIDN'T want to get were what was leading them to more answers. Obviously Graham's people had managed to get bio-samples of their kids, because they were getting hits in China, Eastern Europe and the USA on children from 5-9 who were a match for Yvonne, Zack, Jaqui and Piotr, and in the same areas they were also discovering "heirs" in similar age ranges. The records that they were now starting to find appeared to indicate that the children were being born in a few facilities in China and then shipped off to foster parents as babies as soon as they proved healthy.

When they first started getting hits on their own children's clones, they sat down with the General and laid out the ground rules on what was to happen with them (as well as the Graham clones), getting the President to formally ratify the agreements once they had been made. The core requirement was that none of the clones (Bartowski or Graham) would EVER be employed in any intelligence or military capacity by the USA, or any other country that the President had agreements with (largely made up of the "team" who he'd been working with around the world to take down BGRU). All the clones would be taken when they were discovered and placed with solid, trusted families in countries where they could be protected and given the best, and most "normal" upbringing possible (Clan Carmichael would foot the bills for and watch over the Bartowski clones, the government would foot the bill and provide oversight for the Graham clones). The best that they could hope for was that the fifty or so clones of each of their children that were out there would have a chance to lead happy, fulfilling lives, but there were copious tears shed most nights in Chuck and Sarah's room, thinking about all the lost children who were, in a very real way, their's. There were less tears shed for the hundred or so Graham clones that they believed to be out there, but there were some, as they were in a similar position to the Bartowski clones.

Now that there was a plan in place to try to protect the innocent children (even the Graham clones were innocent children, they couldn't blame them for the sociopath who caused them to be created), they focused on the facilities and people who created them, and they needed an outlet for the rage that had been building in them ever since they found out about the plans for the clone army based on their children, so the existence of their new targets was going to be ending as soon as possible.

Their new resolve to wipe out Graham's cloning facilities and any record that they had ever existed was matched by their resolve to wipe out what was left of BGRU, and all of Clan Carmichael was focussed on that. As they discovered Graham's cloning facilities, CI people led the strike teams in to extract all information that they could find and any viable interrogation suspects, then the facilities would be destroyed with all personnel, the interrogation suspects would be pumped dry of everything they knew before being disposed of. They kept this up until they were satisfied that they had retrieved everything that they knew about BGRU, every shred of information relating to Graham's cloning program for the past twenty years and anything at all relating to Chuck and Sarah's children had been recovered, and that no-one outside of Clan Carmichael (aside from the General and the President) knew anything about Graham's breeding or cloning programs that related to the Bartowski children. When Chuck and Sarah were discussing these things with the General she could see that they didn't even trust her totally with this information, but having finally accepted the worries of being a mother she could relate to that, finding out that bio-samples had been stolen from their children to create a clone army of super soldiers to control the world for a megalomaniacal sociopath who had been manipulating their families for decades to create said super soldiers? She'd have trouble trusting anyone, too. (She also would have trouble believing that this wasn't all a far fetched science fiction story if she hadn't lived through it herself over the past ten years or so.)

When they discovered about the Bartowski clones they resolved to tell the kids, as soon as they felt that were ready to handle it, and they changed the Carmichael Industries direction. They obviously couldn't have one "normal" family with over 200 children spread around the world, but they could set things up so that they could be brought into the fold and looked after when the time came, if they wanted to. Therefore, Carmichael Industries was no more, and the multi-national Quantum Concepts was born, they established centres in most countries where the Bartwoski clones were being relocated to with good families, the QC centres were mostly based on smaller versions of Laputa, with extensive lab facilities added to the previous facilities, QC still did everything that CI did, but added research and development in any of the fields that they expected that their children (all of them) would gravitate to. The initial staffing of the facilities was meagre, they recruited some exceptional people in the relevant fields once they were totally convinced that they could be trusted, but they had no need to fill the ranks yet as they weren't doing much of anything other than hunting down and relocating the clones to good families, and hunting down and obliterating anything and everything that related to (or had any form of connection to) BGRU.

It took over nine months to locate and destroy everything relating to Graham's cloning program, about sixteen months to locate and relocate what they believed to be all of the Bartowski clones and most (they believed) of the Graham clones, but it was going to be years before they managed to track down and destroy what was left of BGRU, they still had a lot of very experienced operatives and directors who knew how to hide, and the rats had scurried deep into their holes.

They finally sat the kids (all of the Bartowski children including Clara and Charlie) down after Jaqui and Piotr's fourteenth birthday to tell them about the clones, they weren't sure that they were 100% ready as yet, but they had to be told before something came out. At first they didn't believe what they were being told, so Chuck went back to the start and told them (with what evidence that they had) about Graham's plan to breed the ultimate soldiers/spies via the Bartowski family, Graham's attempts to create clones of himself, the realisation that the two programs were probably related which led to the search for the Bartowski clones, and the discovery that Graham had started creating his clone army using their "perfect" genes. Then they explained the plan that they had put together in an attempt to ensure that all the clones were raised properly by good families, and the fact that Quantum Concepts was created so that the Bartowski clones could have a place in their world if they chose to. Charlie and Clara of course had questions about why all the Bartowski clones were based on Yvonne, Zack, Jaqui and Piotr, Ellie explained that Graham's breeding plan focused on Chuck as he had believed that Sarah was the only suitable candidate to extend what he'd created in the first generation of his breeding plan (pointing to Chuck and herself), if he'd found other "suitable" breeding partners for them there may have been others that he believed to be suitable to clone for his ultimate warriors, but if he did locate other "suitable" partners his plan must have been disrupted (they heard Casey mutter "By killing his ass!" but Ellie just continued), so the only ones that Graham apparently believed to be suitable for cloning were the second generation of his breeding program, waving to Chuck and Sarah's kids. Charlie asked what other plans that Graham had had for them, but when he saw Ellie glance toward Clara and blanch, he withdrew the question. When they finished and the others were leaving to think about what they'd just heard, Ellie put her hand on Charlie's arm to indicate that he should stay, when it was just them, Chuck, Sarah and Carina, Chuck closed the door and sat down again.

Chuck went to start the explanation but Ellie just held up her hand to him, so he sat back and waited for her to be ready to tell the story. When Ellie had composed herself enough, she explained to Charlie that she (they, when the others went to say something) didn't want Clara, Yvonne or Jaqui to ever hear about the specific plans that Graham had for them, but they wanted him to know so he understood what the family was up against. Even though Clara was older than he was, Charlie was really the leader for his generation of the Bartowskis. Charlie started to say that he didn't want her to tell him if it upset her that much, but Ellie shook her head with tears in her eyes, saying the he needed to know. With that, she drew a breath and told him what Graham had told Chuck, Sarah and Mary about his plans to "train" and use Yvonne and Jaqui, and what "Bella" had told Sarah and Carina about his plans for Clara. Charlie just sat there with tears in his eyes, utterly horrified by what he was hearing. Chuck brought up the transcripts from Bella's interrogation to show him what was actually said about their plans for all of them, including himself, to give Ellie a chance to compose herself (talking about a monster's plans for your daughter and nieces is not something that most can do without being seriously affected), and when she was able she continued, explaining to Charlie that they needed someone in his generation to understand what they were up against, and unfortunately he was the only one bright and mature enough to handle that responsibility, they needed him to look out for Clara and his brothers and sisters and steer them in the right direction when they couldn't come to their parents, and down the track, he would hopefully help his other 200 brothers and sisters if they chose to join the family when they were told the truth about their situation. Chuck took up the explanation there, telling Charlie about what precisely they were setting up with Quantum Concepts, and how they hoped that they'd be able to bring the others into the family via QC when they were old enough to know the real story. Charlie looked around and said that he'd do his best, and after they lined up to hug and kiss him (and apologise for putting something like this on him), they all went upstairs. Chuck held back and when it was just the two of them asked Charlie if he was sure he was OK? When Charlie said that he was Chuck hugged him again and they left to join the others.

**A/N: Send in the clones, it would have been easier to just say that the "heirs" were clones up front, but where would the fun be in that? Hope the build up wasn't too boring for most people.**


	20. The New Generation

**Usual disclaimer for the Land of Litigation, no rights to any characters portrayed, yada, yada.**

Things didn't move very quickly over the years following the discovery of the clones, they managed to get all the Bartowski clones and most of the Graham clones relocated to good families in "safe" countries, so they could hopefully get settled into "normal" lives and grow. Now that the money that Graham had left had dried up, nearly all of the older Graham clones had succumbed to their ailments because their medical care wasn't being funded any more, and the Bartowski children were growing up and developing. They had wiped out all of Graham's cloning facilities and any and all evidence about the cloning program fairly early in the piece, but what was left of BGRU was buried deep, too deep for even them to root out quickly, and they were finding disturbing evidence that (like cockroaches) they were gathering and growing in the shadows.

Molly had finished college and had a job in public relations in a nice company, not too demanding but it was fulfilling for her. Clara had followed her mother into medicine, she didn't have the brilliance required to follow her into her field (neurology research), but she had her father's hands and she was rather better than him because she had a good dose of her mother's intelligence and spirit. She was nearly finished medical school and she didn't appear to need a nudge from the family to get her a slot in a good hospital, she looked like she had that on her own merits. Charlie also followed his mother, into micro-biology, he had everything he needed to make it on his own, and he chose that field because he knew via the family business that bio-terrorism was pretty much the biggest worry in the current and future threat environment, so he wanted to be able to do something about it, while no formal discussions had occurred as yet, it was a given to everyone (including him) that he would be part of Quantum Concepts when he finished his degrees (and probably doctorates). Charlie's step-sisters (Susie and Wendy) looked like they were heading for similar careers to Molly, by Bartowski standards that was disappointing, but that was probably what they'd be happy with and were capable of, so no-one begrudged them a life that suited them. Charlie's half-brothers and half-sisters were all heading into scientific and/or engineering fields, and it was also a given that they'd be in QC as soon as they finished their studies.

In QC, the old school was winding down, but were still quite active, Stefan, Mary, Casey and Emma were semi-retired (they were certainly old enough to retire, but thanks to the BI they were healthy and sharp enough to be quite effective and they weren't ready to sit on the porch and talk about their grandchildren yet, they still had a lot to do and no-one was going to stop them), which meant that they only put in about 30-50 hours a week instead of 2-3 times that, like they used to. Chuck, Sarah, Ellie, Carina, Jeff, Alex, Zondra, Josie and Heather were running QC and doing the majority of the work at that stage, they were all in their forties (except Jeff, who was in his fifties now), but like the "old folk", the BI gave them the boost they needed to shoulder the load as if they were half their age.

Quantum Concepts was still focused on mainly doing government contracts, chasing BGRU and overseeing the Bartowski clones' well-being and development (they were also keeping an eye on the Graham clones to see how they came out). One thing the clones seemed to have answered was the nature versus nurture argument (in the instance of clones at least), as the personality and tendencies of the Bartowski clones tended to match that of their originals/templates (down to the boys generally being nerdier and the girls generally being more active, but both sides showing elements of the other). The Graham clones also seemed to generally follow in their "father"s footsteps, which was a worry that they had hoped would be negated by raising them in "good" families. Another worry was the fact that BGRU obviously had hooks into a lot of areas of the various governments because a quite a number of the Graham clones had already been located and snatched by BGRU (presumably to use them to run BGRU when they were old enough, but whether that was to be as figureheads or actually run the organisation wouldn't be answerable until they were old enough to actually take the reins).

The clones' tendencies were an expected and worrying development (though why they thought it would work out the way they hoped, no-one knew, as things had so rarely done so before), as it showed that the war was far from over, and the new generation(s) would have to deal with it when the original family were out of the picture. They had also lost their principal support in the government when the General/Auntie Diane retired, like the other "old school" members of the clan, she and Roan had the boost of the BI which meant that they were still sharp and capable, but without her position (and with the President who she'd had the ear of out of office now), she couldn't get them the support she could when she had that power. She did still have lots of connections who understood what CI (now QC) had done for the world, and could call on favours, which she did so (partly by brokering QC services for the various government bodies). Once she and Roan had retired, they moved to LA to be near Josie and the clan, so she was on hand whenever she was needed.

Given what was happening with the Graham clones, Chuck and Sarah changed their plans for the upbringing of the Bartowski clones. Obviously the government organisations were still hopelessly compromised by BGRU, therefore the Bartowski clones wouldn't be safe while there were official records that could be used to locate them. Because of that, Chuck and Sarah made the necessary arrangements and met with all of the families hosting the Bartowski clones to get them to agree to relocate and assume new identities. They managed to get everyone to agree without too much trouble, and shifted them far enough to make them almost impossible to find (changing countries where it could be done without affecting the families too much), they also located them close to the QC centres so that a) support was close by if needed, and b) work was easier for the families, as nearly everyone was employed by QC when they were relocated (all the Bartowski host families had been thoroughly screened before Chuck or Sarah would accept them, and they were rather more careful investigating them than they were with the other potential QC employees). So, while the plan had been to leave the Bartowski clones to grow up in as normal as possible an environment until they finished their education and then attempt to bring them into the fold by recruiting them, in the space of less than six months they were all under the QC umbrella with their host families, and off the various governments' radars.

Given that QC was essentially formed to fight the on-going war against BGRU, everyone who was part of QC (no matter what their role) was included in the on-going physical and defence training, and it wasn't too difficult to have that overflow to the kids, so they were given similar training to their original templates (Yvonne, Zack, Jaqui and Piotr) from a relatively early age, it wasn't so much to ready them for the war, it was mostly so they could defend themselves if they needed to. (It had already been seen that what they had gotten from the kids made them pre-disposed to go that way, anyway, so there was no difficulty getting them to enthusiastically join in, it would have actually been harder to keep them away.)

With the BGRU developments, they ended up having to move quicker than they'd planned to staff up Quantum Concepts (once everyone was very carefully screened and investigated, of course, they had learned their lesson with "Bella", and letting a viper like that into their midst was NOT going to happen again). They were acquiring research and development people for the various scientific and technology fields they were taking QC in, but were also acquiring more hackers, analysts and operatives in the cyber-intelligence and intelligence fields. Luckily, with the reputation that Carmichael Industries and the Clan Carmichael had, most of the people they were interested in jumped at the chance of joining the best of the best (and Quantum Concepts was already making a name for itself, no less revered than Carmichael Industries). Their biggest operation was in LA, based in Laputa, but they were also staffing up the other centres around the world, too. They had acquired a few hundred people of the best in their fields around the world to bring up QC's capabilities by the time that Charlie finished his studies and joined the family business.

Of course, with the extra free time that Stefan had nowadays, he was back to inventing things all the time (most of which were too effective/dangerous to allow the rest of the world to see, let alone give access to, of course). One of his "minor" developments was an upgrade of the hideaway gun, he looked at the weapon he'd created for the kids originally and decided that he could do better, so he added another pair of tube magazines (in a diamond pattern) to give the pistol a maximum capacity of 29 (made up o rd tube mags + 4 staging chambers + 1 in the chamber) for about a third increase in weight and a bit over 1cm increase in height, which meant that it still worked quite well as a hideaway pistol and had about twice the capacity. Another development was to reduce the size of the mobile node tablet to a phablet (much like the phablet that was part of the original mobile node), so the system was now down to the AR glasses, virtual touch screen/trackball watch/bracelet, and a phablet that slipped into a pocket easily.

One big development Stefan and Chuck worked on together was a significant Electric Vehicle upgrade on the "special" Odysseys which had become the mainstay of their transport years ago, they maintained (and extended) the sleek appearance and high end performance of the Odysseys with all electric "motor in wheel" technology and fully remote/autonomous control capabilities, adding a further upgrade to the composite armour capabilities (it could handle 40mm barrages and bigger rockets now) and more armaments (including a concealed double gun roof turret). These stylish seven seaters looked quite at home pulling up with the other limos at major events, but they could out-fight any traditional military LAVs and outrun anything on the ground (and they'd added the ability to jack up the suspension on the fly to give them off road capabilities, too). The also came up with an electric bike using similar technology that Chuck and some of the others adopted, they had one gun fore and aft and the fairing could deflect up to 25mm rounds, so as long as you were heading at whoever was shooting at you, you had some protection if you tucked in behind the fairing (the Nighthawk was overdue for retirement and the new E-Bikes were a major step up). They did still have the old Odysseys in the garages for use when required, they (and the few other traditional cars that had been hung onto like Sarah's beloved Shooting Brake) had been converted/re-engineered to run on hydrogen to meet EPA requirements and also because hydrogen filling stations and charging stations were getting more common than fossil fuel filling stations nowadays, but the electric vehicles were the way things were the direction of the future, so it only made sense to base any developments on that technology.

Due to the resistance to change aircraft fuel situations around the world, the SonicStars and most of the other aircraft were still using traditionally fueled engines (bio-fueled at times, but essentially the same as they were twenty years before). QC was involved in research for alternative fuel aircraft engine options, and that was looking as though it could end up being a worthwhile revenue winner not too far down the track, but for now they had to stay with the fuel options that they could get wherever they went, and that meant traditional fuels. They did implement upgrades to full remote/autonomous piloting technology to all of their aircraft, so the SonicStars or other aircraft could be sent wherever necessary without requiring pilots to be aboard (even though those of them who were certified to fly the various aircraft were officially logging quite a few hours, to the extent that some of them were looking like full time pilots on the basis of the hours logged).

While they weren't getting much mileage on the BGRU issues (only managing to take out one or two locations and half a dozen notable people each year generally, because they'd buried themselves so deep), they still had their regular work for the government agencies, plus the new fields that QC was moving into, and the effort involved in keep an eye on the whole family (including the new additions), so they were kept pretty busy. They would always be in demand for government work, as no-one else in the world could come close to their performance in locating and extracting information out of electronic systems, so if it was enemy nations, rogue intelligence organisations or operations, criminal organisations or operations, or plots within their own government organisations, they were the people to go to to get the information or solution. When it came to physical operations, though, they generally only got involved when it was BGRU or some other villain from their pasts, when it wasn't directly related to them, they let the client (well the government agency who engaged them) do their own dirty work.

As long as they were still delivering for the government organisations, they had the support they needed to work outside the normal legal restrictions, which was why they kept taking the government jobs. Dealing with BGRU and the rest of the nefarious types that were always after them, much of what they had to do was borderline to blatantly illegal, so they couldn't afford to give up any of the goodwill that they had acquired, with any major government. Another thing that was obvious was that the primary team wouldn't have any chance to retire in the next twenty to thirty years, within twenty years, all of the Bartowski clones should be at the point where they were ready to join Quantum Concepts and contribute, and Charlie and all of the original kids would be on board and building their own reputations by then, but until the originals had been up to speed and recognised for at least fifteen to twenty years, the heads of the intelligence and military organisations that QC dealt with would not accept them as the leaders of the company, so Chuck, Sarah, Ellie and Carina (probably) would have to stay on as the titular heads of QC until the kids had enough experience and recognition under their belts to take over in their own right. Of course, fifteen to twenty years after that the clones would be ready to start stepping up, and if the next generation started their families within the next ten years, then their kids should be up to speed in time for when the clones started winding down. It was tiring, trying to plan how things had to come together to keep the family business up to speed enough to support the coming generations.

**A/N: I'm thinking that this may be the logical point to wind up Bad Pennies, the names that we really love to hate to been largely dealt with, but there's plenty of strife waiting for Clan Carmichael down the track, with BGRU refusing to go away and the fact that they have around a hundred new Langston Grahams simmering away to come to the fore about the same period that the Bartowski clones should be up to speed. Chuck and Sarah's kids are a few years away from starting to join the family business (IE: Quantum Concepts and the spy world), but thanks to the BI, Chuck and the rest of the "young" team will still be up to handling everything for at least another twenty to thirty years, and even the "old" crowd will probably still be up to contributing their knowledge and experience to help resolve the issues that arise for the family.**

**So, unless anyone can present a good argument that shows a better reason for keeping Bad Pennies going than I have thought of as yet, I think Pennies is ready to have a nap. If there's any interest, I do have a few ideas about picking it up with another story at least ten to fifteen years down the track (with all the original characters still involved, but getting ready to hand the reins over to the new generation).**

**Thanks guys.**


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